The House of Special Purpose

by John Boyne

  Taking that day’s Times from my briefcase, I glanced at the headlines for a moment and my eyes were taken by a report about the uprising in Georgia. The Mensheviks were battling the Bolsheviks for independence, but their struggle appeared to be failing. I was well aware of the numerous insurgencies and uprisings that were taking place throughout the various parts of the empire and of the number of states that were striking out for sovereignty. I usually read The Times during my tea break at the library and paid special interest to any story which related to my homeland, but I had paid particular attention to this one in recent weeks on account of the Menshevik leader, Colonel Cholokashvili, who had been part of a delegation sent to Tsarskoe Selo during 1917 to report to the Tsar on the progress of the Russian armies at the front. He was younger than the other representatives at the palace, and I had been fortunate to engage in a brief conversation with him when he was leaving and he had said to me that guarding the life of the Emperor and his heir was of as much importance as safeguarding our borders during the war. His words had been of particular importance to me at the time, for I had become worried that I was forsaking my true duties by remaining in the employ of the Imperial Family when tens of thousands of young men my own age were dying in the Carpathian mountains or on the battlefields of the Masurian Lakes.

  By the time I finished the article, I found that both my headache and stomach upset had begun to subside a little, but I thought I would spend the day in bed nevertheless and hopefully wake up feeling fully restored.

  I opened the door to the bedroom and stared.

  Lying across the bed was Zoya, her eyes closed, her arms spread out from her sides, blood seeping from a pair of deep wounds which had been etched across her wrists, a reddish-black puddle blending into the blanket beneath her. I stood at the doorway, frozen, horrified, experiencing the most curious sensation of incomprehension and impotence. It was almost as if my brain could not fully assimilate the scene that was presented to it, and because of that was unable to offer instruction to my body as to how to respond. Finally, however, with a great animal roar that emerged from the pit of my stomach, I ran towards the bed and lifted her in my arms, tears streaming down my face as I looked into her eyes and shouted her name over and over in a desperate bid to revive her.

  Within a few seconds, her eyelids flickered slightly; her pupils focussed on my own for a moment before she looked away and an exhausted sigh escaped her lips. She did not welcome my presence; she did not want to be saved. I ran to the wardrobe, grabbed a pair of scarves from a shelf and brought them back to the bed, locating the place on each arm where the knife had entered and binding the wounds tightly, cutting off the flow of blood. A deep cry was coming from Zoya’s mouth now as she begged me to leave her alone, to let her be, but I could not, I would not, and having secured her arms, I ran out on to the street and down to the end of our row of houses, where, to our good fortune, a doctor’s surgery was located. I must have looked like a lunatic as I ran inside, wild-eyed, my shirt, arms and face covered with Zoya’s blood, and a middle-aged woman sitting in the reception area let out a terrible scream, perhaps mistaking me for a crazed murderer intent on doing them harm. But I had enough wits about me to explain to the nurse what had happened and to ask for help, to demand it, and now, quickly, before it was too late.

  In the days that followed, I often wondered about the headache and stomach bug which affected me on that day. It was so unusual for me to have suffered from them and yet, had I been in my usual good health, I would have remained at the library of the British Museum for the entire day and been widowed by the time I returned home. Considering the life that I have lived, the people I have known, the places I have seen, it is unusual for me to be intimidated by someone simply because he holds a position of authority, but Dr Hooper, who took care of Zoya while she was in hospital, awed me slightly and made me anxious of appearing foolish in his company. He was an elderly gentleman, cocooned inside an expensive tweed suit, with a neatly trimmed Romanov beard, piercing blue eyes and a trim athletic body unusual in a man of his age and rank. I suspected that he terrified the doctors and nurses under his charge and did not suffer fools gladly. It annoyed me that he did not see fit to talk to me during the weeks when my wife was recovering from her injuries at the hospital; whenever I passed him on the corridor and attempted to converse with him, he begged off on the grounds that he was too busy for me at that moment and referred me to one of his juniors instead, none of whom seemed any more informed about my wife’s condition than I was myself. The day before I was due to take her home, however, I phoned his secretary in advance and begged for a meeting with the doctor prior to his signing her out. And so, three weeks after I had discovered Zoya bleeding and dying on our bed, I found myself seated in a large, comfortable office on the top floor of the psychiatric wing, staring across at this most senior doctor as he examined my wife’s file carefully.

  ‘Mrs Jachmenev’s physical injuries have healed perfectly well,’ he announced finally, setting the file aside and looking across at me. ‘The wounds she inflicted on herself were not deep enough to lacerate the arteries. She was lucky with that. Most people don’t know how to finish the job correctly.’

  ‘There was an awful lot of blood,’ I said, hesitant to relive the experience but feeling that it was necessary that he know the full story. ‘I thought … when I found her, that is … well, she was very pale and—’

  ‘Mr Jachmenev,’ he said, holding up a hand to silence me, ‘you’ve been in here two, three times a day since your wife was admitted, have you not? I’ve been impressed by your attentiveness. You might be surprised by how few husbands bother to visit their wives, regardless of the reasons for their admission. But during that time you must have noticed an improvement in her condition. There’s really no need for you to worry about any of her physical problems any more. There might be a slight scarring on her arms, but it will fade in time and become barely noticeable.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, a sigh of relief escaping from me. ‘I must admit that when I found her, I immediately thought the worst.’

  ‘Of course you know my speciality, however, and I am more concerned with her mental scars than her physical ones. As you know, every attempted suicide must be thoroughly evaluated before we can allow the perpetrator to return home.’ The perpetrator. ‘For their sake as much as anything else. I’ve spoken quite extensively to your wife over the last few weeks in an attempt to find the root cause of her behaviour and I must be honest with you, Mr Jachmenev, she does give me cause for concern.’

  ‘You mean she might try this again?’

  ‘No, I don’t think that’s likely,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Most survivors of suicide attempts are too ashamed and shocked by their actions to try a second time. Most, you understand, don’t really mean it in the first place. It is, as they say, a cry for help.’

  ‘And you think that’s what it was?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘If she meant it, she would have found a gun and shot herself,’ he replied, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘There’s no way back from that. People who survive want to. That’s in her favour to begin with.’

  I wasn’t so convinced of this in Zoya’s case; after all, as far as she had been concerned I was not going to return home for another six hours at least. She would never have survived the bleeding for that long, regardless of which veins she had cut. And where, after all, would she have found a gun? Perhaps, I considered, Dr Hooper was judging us all by the standards of his own armoury. He looked for all the world like a man who spent his weekends rifle in hand, slaughtering all forms of wildlife in the company of minor royalty.

  ‘And in your wife’s case,’ he continued, ‘I think the shock of the attempt, coupled with her feelings towards you, might prevent such a recurrence anyway.’

  ‘Her feelings for me?’ I asked, raising an eyebrow. ‘She wasn’t thinking of me when she did this thing, though, was she?’

  The words were unw
orthy of me, but, like Zoya’s, my own mood had swung from positive to hideously bleak over recent weeks. There were nights when I lay awake, thinking of nothing other than how close she had been to death and how I could possibly have survived without her. There were days when I berated myself for not recognizing her suffering and coming to her aid. There were times when I pressed my fists against my forehead in frustration, angry that she thought so little of me that she could cause me so much suffering.

  ‘You mustn’t think that this is about you,’ said Dr Hooper finally, seeming to read my mind as he stepped around from the desk now and sank into an armchair beside me. ‘It’s not about you at all. It’s about her. It’s about her mind. Her depression. Her unhappiness.’

  I shook my head, unable to take it in. ‘Dr Hooper,’ I said, choosing my words carefully, ‘you must understand, Zoya and I have a very happy marriage. We rarely argue, we love each other very much.’

  ‘And you’ve been together …’

  ‘We met when we were teenagers. We married five years ago. They have been happy times.’

  He nodded and made a church steeple out of his hands, pointing his fingers towards the heavens, and breathed heavily as he considered this.

  ‘You have no children, of course,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘As you know, we have suffered a number of miscarriages.’

  ‘Yes, your wife has spoken to me of that. Three, is that correct?’

  I hesitated for a moment at the memory of these three lost babies, but finally nodded my head. ‘Yes,’ I said, coughing to clear my throat. ‘Yes, it has happened three times.’

  He leaned forward and looked me directly in the eye. ‘Mr Jachmenev, there are a number of things which I am not at liberty to discuss with you, things that Zoya and I have spoken about in confidence, under the auspices of doctor and patient, you understand?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, frustrated at not being told exactly what was wrong with her when it was I, above all others, who wanted to help her. ‘But I am her husband, Dr Hooper. There are certain things—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said quickly, dismissing this as he leaned back. I felt that he was examining me carefully – analysing me, even – as if he was trying to decide for himself how much he could permit me to know and how much he should leave out. ‘If I was to say that your wife is a very unhappy woman, Mr Jachmenev,’ he said finally, ‘you would no doubt understand.’

  ‘I would have thought that was obvious,’ I said, my voice low and angry, ‘considering what she did.’

  ‘You may even think that she is disturbed in her mind.’

  ‘You don’t think she is?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think that either explanation entirely covers what is wrong with Zoya. Such words are too simplistic, too facile. Her problems lie deeper, I think. In her history. In the things that she has witnessed. In the memories that she has repressed.’

  It was my turn to stare at him now and I could feel myself growing a little more pale, unsure what he was getting at. I could not imagine for a moment that Zoya would have confided the details of our past – of her past – to him, even if she did trust him. It seemed like an entirely uncharacteristic gesture on her part. And I couldn’t help but wonder whether he knew that there was something he wasn’t seeing, and that I might tell him if guided along that path. Of course, he did not know me; he did not realize that I would never betray my wife.

  ‘Such as what?’ I asked finally.

  ‘I think we both know the answer to that, Mr Jachmenev, don’t you?’

  I swallowed and set my jaw; I was not going to admit to this either way. ‘What I want to know,’ I said, a note of determination entering my tone, ‘is whether I should continue to be worried about her, whether I should be watching over her throughout the day. I want to know whether something like this might ever happen again. I have to work every day, of course. I cannot be with her constantly.’

  ‘It’s hard to say,’ he replied, ‘but on consideration, I don’t think you have very much to worry about. I will be undertaking further sessions with her, of course, on an out-patient basis. I think I can help her come to terms with the things that cause her suffering. Your wife labours under the illusion that the people closest to her are in danger, you realize that, don’t you?’

  ‘She’s mentioned it to me,’ I admitted. ‘Only briefly. It’s something that she keeps locked inside herself.’

  ‘She’s talked about these miscarriages, for example,’ he said. ‘And about your friend, Monsieur Raymer.’

  I nodded and looked down for a moment, acknowledging the memory. Leo.

  ‘Your wife must be made to see that she is not responsible for any of these things,’ he said, standing up now to indicate that our interview was at an end. ‘That is down to me, of course, during our out-patient sessions. And down to you, in your life together.’

  Zoya was already dressed and waiting for me when I entered the ward, sitting on the side of her bed, neat and prim in a simple cotton dress and overcoat that I had brought for her the day before. She looked up and smiled as she saw me walking towards her and I smiled too, taking her in my arms, pleased that the great bandages that covered the healing wounds on her arms were hidden to me by the sleeves of the coat.

  ‘Georgy,’ she said quietly, breaking down in tears as she saw what must have been a mixed expression on my face. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said – a curious choice of words, for of course it was anything but all right. ‘At least you can leave here now. Everything will be fine, I promise you that.’

  She nodded and took my arm as we left the ward. ‘Are we going home?’ she asked me.

  Home. Another strange word. Where was it, after all? Not here in London. Not Paris, either. Home was many hundreds of miles away, a place to which we could never return. I wasn’t going to lie to her by saying yes.

  ‘Back to our little flat,’ I said quietly. ‘To close the door behind us and be together, as we were always meant to be. Just the two of us. GeorgyandZoya.’

  The Tsar’s Signature

  THAT IT SHOULD end like it did, in a railway carriage in Pskov, still astonishes me.

  We didn’t celebrate the arrival of 1917 with the same degree of festivity or merriment as we had previous years. The Tsar’s household was in such disarray that I even considered leaving St Petersburg and returning to Kashin, or perhaps heading westward in search of a new life entirely; only the fact that Anastasia would never have left her family – and that I never would have been permitted to take her with me anyway – prevented me from doing so. But tension surrounded all of us who were part of the Imperial entourage. The end was in sight, it was just a question of when.

  The Tsar had spent much of 1916 with the army, and in his absence, the Tsaritsa had been left in charge of political matters. While he maintained his position at Stavka, she dominated the government with a strength and single-mindedness that was as impressive as it was misguided. For of course she spoke not with her own voice, but in the words of the starets. His influence had been everywhere. But he was dead now, the Tsar was away, and she was alone.

  News of Father Gregory’s death had reached the Winter Palace within a day or two of that terrible December evening when his body, poisoned and bullet-ridden, had been thrown into the River Neva. The Empress had been distraught, of course, and relentless in her insistence that his murderers be held to account for their crimes, but recognizing the vulnerability of her own position, she quickly began to internalize her distress. I watched her sometimes as she sat in her private sitting-room, staring blankly out of the window while one of her waiting women chattered on about some unimportant piece of palace gossip, and I could see in her eyes the determination to go on, to rule, and I admired her for it. Perhaps she was not so much Rasputin’s pawn, after all.

  When the Tsar returned for a brief Christmas visit, however, the Tsaritsa insisted that Felix Yusupov b
e brought to justice, but as he was a member of the extended Imperial Family the Tsar claimed that there was nothing he could do.

  ‘You are more in thrall to these hangers-on and bloodsucking leeches than you are to God,’ she cried within hours of his reappearance, an afternoon when we were all shocked by how unwell Nicholas looked. It was as if he had aged ten, perhaps fifteen years since we had last seen him in August. He looked as if one more drama to face would be enough for him and he would happily pass out and die.

  ‘Father Gregory was not God,’ insisted the Tsar, massaging his temples with his fingers and looking around the room in search of support. His four daughters were pretending the argument was not taking place; their attendants were retreating into the shadows of the room, as was I. Alexei was watching from a seat in the corner; he was almost as pale as his father, and I wondered whether he had not injured himself earlier in the day and told no one. It was sometimes possible to tell when the internal bleeding had started: the panicked, desperate look on the boy’s face, the desire to sit perfectly still to ward off approaching trauma, were familiar sights to those of us who knew him well.

  ‘He was God’s representative,’ shouted the Tsaritsa.

  ‘Is that so?’ asked the Tsar, looking across at her now angrily, fighting to maintain his composure. ‘And I thought that I was God’s representative in Russia. I thought that I was the anointed one, not some peasant from Pokrovskoye.’

  ‘Oh, Nicky!’ she cried in frustration, throwing herself into a chair and burying her face in her hands for a moment, before standing up and marching over to him again, addressing him as if she was his mother, the Dowager Empress Marie Fedorovna, and not his wife. ‘You cannot allow murderers to go free.’

  ‘I do not want to,’ he said quickly. ‘Do you think that is what I want from Russia? From my own family?’

  ‘They are hardly your family,’ she interrupted.

  ‘If I punish them, it is as if I am saying that we approved of Father Gregory’s influence.’