The Masters

by Christopher Nicole

  From the moment of her confession she had been kept in solitary confinement. It was of course known that she had not been tortured apart from being beaten and raped. Almost the moment she had felt Michaelin’s hands pulling her buttocks apart she had agreed to sign his paper. Sonia Cohen had gazed at her then, in a mixture of pity and contempt. Then Sonia had been led away, and she had not seen her again until they stood in the dock together.

  Now she was in a cattle car with forty other convicted terrorists. Thank God for the guards. Because in the people around her she could see the faces of Vladimir Ulianov and his woman. And then there were Joseph Fine and Sonia Cohen. They stayed close together.

  And now the train was pulling into Moscow Central. The guards left the cattle car and resumed their normal positions on the roofs and platforms of the train. And in Moscow, too, the sexes were segregated, the men being marched off to a separate car, “Can’t have all you ladies arriving in Irkutsk pregnant, now can we?” joked the guard commander.

  Crowds stood around to gawk at the train, and its passengers, through the open cattle doors. Patricia removed herself to the far corner of the car, and huddled against herself. Because now the doors were being closed, and the train was beginning to hiss and puff and clank as it moved out of the siding. It gathered speed, and within a few minutes the houses were left behind and they were rushing east, towards the Urals. Hitherto no one had spoken, but now one of the women crawled across to where Patricia sat. “Bitch!” she remarked.

  “Betrayer,” said another joining her.

  Patricia attempted to ignore them, pulling up her legs and clasping her knees, trying to gather herself into a ball. “If she died,” said another woman, “of suffocation, they’d never prove who did it.”

  The first woman smiled. “There’s no hurry. They won’t be stopping for another four hours. I want to hear her scream.’

  She reached for Patricia, and Patricia uncoiled herself and struck at her. She certainly landed a blow, but then her arms were seized and her legs, when she attempted to kick, and she was stretched on the floor of the car while eager hands tore at her clothing. “Stop it! Stop it at once!”

  They raised their heads, and through the tear haze Patricia blinked at Sonia Cohen and Olga Krupskaya, standing above them like two very young avenging angels.

  “She betrayed you,” one of the women said.

  They stared at her. “We are alive because of her,” Olga told them. “Our sentences have been commuted, because of her. The Tsar could not sentence the sister of one of his principal boyars to death. But he could not commute her sentence and leave us to hang, either. So we are all alive. And we are going to stay alive, until we can get home again. So you should get down on your knees and thank the good Lord in Heaven for the Countess Bolugayevska.”

  They continued to stare at her for some seconds, while Patricia held her breath. Then they released her, and slowly moved away. Sonia and Olga helped her sit up. “I thought you hated me, like all the others,” Patricia muttered.

  “I mean what I said. We were all going to be condemned anyway, and hanged, but for you. Now...” Sonia put her arm round Patricia’s shoulders. “It takes two to survive.”

  PART THREE - THE PEOPLE

  ‘I know, and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backwards.’

  William Henry Seward

  CHAPTER 11 - THE VISITOR

  In Irkutsk the winters were long and cold, and the soil was underlaid with permafrost. The province consisted of what was called taiga, or swampy forest, and in fact winter was the best time for moving about — apart from the risk of getting frostbite or freezing to death — because then at least the swamps were frozen over. In the summer, when the temperatures often soared, the country became a vast bog, out of which the great trees, pine, fir and spruce, reached skywards. It was a time of year when it could be as hot as in central Africa, and when the mosquitoes arose out of the stagnant water in vast aerial flotillas. It was a time of misery. But then, of course, the political prisoners had not been sent to Irkutsk to be anything else but miserable. The truly amazing aspect of their situation was how often they managed to be happy. The women knew that they were a good deal better off than the men. The men worked in the mines. If they were well behaved, they mined iron ore. If they were rebellious and insubordinate, they mined salt. The women cooked and made clothes for the men; they seldom saw them.

  But they would see them today. Another reason for being happy, as they flooded down the road from their barracks towards the city of Irkutsk itself. Irkutsk was hardly a city, really, merely an administrative centre on an inlet off Lake Baikal, at the confluence of the Angara and Irkut rivers. But it had been founded as long ago as 1652 as an outpost of the expanding Russian Empire, and remained an important staging post. Today, its importance was to grow even more. And they would be there to see it. The women sang as they marched along. They were happy just to be doing something different. Patricia and Sonia held hands, as they did so much of the time. They were the two youngest women, and they had been the most refined, when this ordeal had begun. They had known that they had no means of resisting what was being done to them, what was going to happen to them, time and again, save by relying upon their mutual strengths, their mutual will to survive, and to use their hatred for some practical purpose.

  Thus they loved. It was seldom a physical love. They had to suffer too much physical abuse from those who interrupted their relationship; from guards, men and women who delighted in abusing the prisoners in any event, and found an errant countess and an innocent Jewess the ideal playthings, or their fellow prisoners, women much older than themselves, and bigger and stronger, who had desires. But even when suffering, they could look at each other, and give a secret smile. Their minds touched each other, and held each other, and loved each other. The world outside Irkutsk no longer had meaning. There had been talk of a general amnesty for the Tsar’s coronation; that was a Russian tradition. But if there had been an amnesty, it had not penetrated to Irkutsk. Perhaps their crime had been too recent. Patricia no longer even felt bitter about that, or that her crime consisted in having attended an illicit meeting without even knowing what it was all about. Because those things were a part of the world that had vanished. The girl who had once slept between scented satin sheets and regarded all life as belonging to her alone was surely a figment of the imagination. Even the girl who had looked into a volley of rifle fire and survived could not have been real, because that girl had been a countess. Reality was Irkutsk.

  But today, midsummer 1898, that forgotten, unreal world was impinging upon their existence. It was an uneasy concept. “Mind you cheer,” said Rauser the guard captain. “I want you to drive the birds from the trees.”

  The women lined up along the embankment, looking at the railroad track. The track ended only a few yards further on, at the outskirts of the town, and there too a sizeable crowd was gathered. And now the women were joined by a large number of the male prisoners, also recruited to cheer the engineering marvel they were about to see. They listened to the wail of a whistle in the distance, and watched a plume of smoke rising above the trees to the west.

  The track had originated in Moscow, and from there been laid east to Perm in the Urals, then Yekaterinberg and Omsk, where it was joined by the southern branch, which came by way of Samara. The single track then continued to Omsk and then Tomsk, before arriving here on the banks of Baikal. Some people said that there were plans to lay the track right across the lake, and continue to the Pacific. Looking at Baikal, far shores lost in the mist, that seemed a foolish concept. That the railway had got this far into the very centre of Siberia was sufficiently remarkable.

  The train came in sight. It was not a very impressive train, consisting as it did of an engine and four carriages, but it was certainly crowded. with armed soldiers riding on the steps and on the roofs, while the platforms were packed with dignitaries come to celebrate this latest achievement of Tsarist technology. �
�Cheer!” shouted Captain Rauser, and the women cheered. So did the men, as the train growled its way up to the end of the track. The squealing of the brakes actually shut out most of the applause, but the cheering continued after the train had come to a stop, and the first of the dignitaries, who Patricia gathered was the governor of Irkutsk Province, had great difficulty making his speech heard above the din.

  Olga had keen ears, however. “We have been given the day off,” she said. “To celebrate. Come.” She had been looking at the men, and a moment later she was in her Vladimir’s arms. Patricia was surprised. She would never have supposed Ulianov could possibly show such affection. But tears rolled down the heavy-set man’s cheeks as he hugged his fiancée. He had grown more rugged with his years of exile and hard labour, and his hair was thinning. But his anger had not diminished.

  “Joseph!” Sonia was in Joseph’s arms, being hugged and kissed. Now he had filled out, and his body was a mass of muscular strength. The slightly diffident expression had left his face, and he looked like what his exile had made him, a hardy miner rather than an anxious intellectual.

  “Your Excellency?” He peered over Sonia’s shoulder.

  “Please,” Patricia begged. “Not here. I am Patricia.”

  “Patricia.” The word rolled off his tongue.

  Sonia released him. “Why do you not hug her as well?” she asked.

  “I should like that,” Patricia said.

  *

  They picnicked, in the trees away from the track, on such food as they had been able to obtain. Ulianov had even secured a bottle of wine. “Is there news of Mama and Papa?” Sonia asked.

  “No news,” Joseph told her. “Or of my father. But at least they are not here. So...they have either escaped arrest, or they are dead.” Sonia bit her lip.

  “Mama and Papa,” Ulianov sneered. “Are you not adults? To weep for your Mama and Papa is childish.”

  “Do not take him seriously,” Olga told them. “He still weeps for his mother.”

  “My mother is dead,” Ulianov declared. “What I am saying is, there can be no room for sentiment in our group. In what we have to do, when we leave here.”

  “What do we have to do, when we leave here, Vladimir?” Joseph asked. “Plot another assassination, and get sent back? Or hanged, this time?”

  “Do you think I am interested in assassinations?” Ulianov demanded. “Except as a means to achieving our objective? And our objective must be Russia!” They stared at him. “Oh, yes, my friends,” Ulianov said. “The Romanovs will not last forever. They have lasted too long already. But now...the Tsar has not the strength of his father.” He laughed. “So far the Tsaritsa has produced only girls. There is no heir to the throne.”

  “That is the fault of the German woman,” Olga pointed out.

  Ulianov shrugged. “They will fall together.”

  “And when will this cataclysmic event happen?”

  “Whenever there is a crisis. It will not be too long. I happen to know that Russia is planning a war with Japan. That is the sole reason for building this railway.”

  “That will be a crisis?” Joseph asked contemptuously. “Russia will crush Japan like an elephant treading on a nut.”

  “Maybe,” Ulianov conceded. “But it will still require a great effort. All the soldiers, every bullet and every gun and every shell, will have to be transported over this railway. The country’s infrastructure will be ruined. There are already riots in the south, in the Ukraine, in Moscow, in Petersburg itself.”

  “When is this war to start?” Olga asked.

  “As soon as this railway is completed to the Pacific, and as soon as they have secured Port Arthur as a base for a Pacific fleet. Some time in the next five years.”

  “In five years time I shall be twenty-five,” Patricia muttered. “I shall be an old woman.”

  “You will be an old child,” Ulianov remarked contemptuously. “But tell me this: do you really wish to remain here, for eight years?”

  “It is three thousand miles to St Petersburg,” Joseph said. “That is as the crow flies. It would be a matter of nearer four thousand miles, which we would have to walk, pursued by the Cossacks and the police. For every man who escapes from Siberia, a hundred die or are recaptured. As for women...”

  “You are a coward,” Ulianov declared. “You are all cowards. Don’t you think that most of us are going to die here, if we stay? Several already have.”

  “Even if we made it,” Sonia said. “They would still track us down. They know our names, what we look like...”

  “They would not know what we looked like, after we had walked three thousand miles. We would not recognise ourselves. As for names, why, we would change ours, that is all.”

  “Change our names?” Patricia demanded.

  “Well,” Ulianov said, “you would certainly have to change yours, Countess.”

  “What name will you take, Vladimir?” Olga asked.

  Ulianov considered. “I will call myself Lenin,” he said. “There is a name, short and sharp and strong. Lenin! What will you call yourself, Joseph?”

  “I have better things to do than make up names for myself,” Joseph said. “It does not matter what name one dies under, unless one is famous.”

  “Death,” Ulianov sneered. “That is all you can think of. Are you afraid of death? Death is nothing. If you are afraid of death, then you are afraid of life, and if you are afraid of life, then you are nothing. So perhaps we will not make it. We will at least die free men. And women. And think of this: if we did make it, we would be immortal, indestructible. We would have been to hell and back. We would fear nothing, because there would be nothing left to fear.” He gazed at them, and they gazed back. Then he shrugged again. “At least think about it.” He stood up, and reached for Olga’s hand. “They will soon call us back. Let us at least enjoy a few minutes.” He led her into the trees.

  Sonia and Patricia looked at each other, and then at Joseph.

  “Would you go with him?” Sonia asked Patricia. She was not referring to escaping.

  Patricia gazed at Joseph. To be taken, with love and gentleness...the way Duncan had taken her. “What about you?” she asked.

  Sonia gave a twisted little smile. “It is you he wants.”

  *

  “I don’t reckon you’ll find the place has changed much, Mr Cromb,” Captain Robbins remarked, as the Lusignan slipped between the coils of the Tiger’s Tail and entered Port Arthur. “It’s been largely rebuilt, of course. But the Chinese are still here.”

  “I don’t quite understand about that,” Duncan said. “I thought the Japanese wanted Port Arthur more than anything else. Including the indemnity.”

  “I guess they did,” Robbins agreed. “But when the big boys ganged up on them, they had to forget it.”

  “Just like that? Wouldn’t it have been the devil of a job for the Europeans to enforce that decision, so far away?”

  “With ships and men and guns, maybe. But when you come down to it, it’s the dollar that counts, whether you happen to call it a franc or a mark or a rouble. That war with China just about bankrupted Japan. They were in no state to take on the rest of the world in a trade war as well as a possible shooting war. So they caved in. But they weren’t happy about it. I reckon there could be some interesting developments over the next few years.”

  Duncan studied the town as the anchor was let go and the ship was surrounded by the bumboats. He had been in two minds about returning here, which was why he had put it off for two years after graduating. There was no longer any compelling reason to do so, or certainly, to return to Russia, since Mom had informed him that Patricia had got married. That had been a tremendous blow, as much to his self-esteem as to his real feelings for the girl. The result was that he had thrown himself into the life of the student cum-athlete cum-man about town without reservation, over the past four years.

  He was now a graduate and a member of the board of the Cromb Shipping Lines, Inc. Charles of
course continued to make all the decisions; he regarded his younger brother’s various escapades with suspicion. Alexandra no longer had anything to do with the company, although she remained a shareholder. But Charles also had been in favour of this odyssey, because after four years he had no idea when he was ever going to see their mother again. Mom, judging by her letters, was obviously in the best of health, even if she had, oddly, abandoned being chatelaine of Bolugayen in favour of accompanying cousin Peter and his wife back to Port Arthur. Charles had felt a member of the family should go and find out what Anna’s ultimate intentions were. She had politely turned aside any queries in her letters, and while she seemed perfectly content with the way the line was being run, as she remained the principal shareholder her continued absence was a cause for concern.

  Duncan had been volunteered, and he had been happy with that. He had supposed a voyage back to Port Arthur might exorcise all of those demons, composed at once of his still urgent desire for Patricia and his secret ambition to share in some of the Bolugayevski wealth and power. But now, as he was taken ashore in the steam launch, he was aware only of memories, flooding back. He wondered if Mom had Li-su with her.

  *

  Duncan had telegraphed from Yokohama, and was thus met, but by a groom he did not know. This was disappointing, but having studied Russian assiduously over the past four years he was able to carry on a conversation. “Is the Countess expecting me?” he asked.