Berezovo

by A J Allen

  “Even though I wasn’t there,” said Trotsky stiffly, “I can tell you quite categorically that that is a lie. My comrades are too busy and too disciplined and respectful of each other to… to be doing what you are implying. “

  Rocking backwards on his seat, the driver crowed with laughter.

  “At it like knives, they were!” he insisted. “Men and women, women and women; men and men. Disgusting, it was. The way I heard it, the Cossack didn’t dare go near them lest they upset the horses!”

  “Oh, what rubbish!” snorted Trotsky.

  The man was irritating beyond belief; his inconsequential chattering was boring into his head. Trapped here, in a sledge under armed guard crossing this barren wasteland and he had to put up with the filthy outpourings of an illiterate drunk as he headed towards exile. It was one circle of Hell, he reflected, that Dante had never dreamt of.

  Seeing his disgruntled expression, the driver ceased his mockery.

  “Still,” he said, “whatever you say, I hope you got your ration when you were free, because there will be fuck all where you are going.”

  Taking another swig from the bottle, he nodded at the train of sleighs that followed in their wake.

  “See, some of the others, the older ones, they’ve been a bit smarter. They’ve brought their own with them, so to speak. A young lad like you… well…”

  He sucked in his teeth and shook his head with regret. Tucking the bottle between his feet, he turned back to face the team and shook out the reins. From over his hunched shoulder, his voice carried his dour forecasts.

  “Won’t be long before you’re pulling your rag and looking twice at reindeer. Or getting a dose from the Ostyaks.”

  “What are Ostyaks?” Trotsky asked.

  But the garrulous mood had finally left his tormentor; evaporated with the vodka fumes.

  Removing his pipe from his mouth and clearing his throat, the guard, who until now been an amused spectator, provided the answer to his question. “The Ostyaks are the local natives. They live mainly to the south of Obdorskoye. They survive by fishing the Ob. Good trappers too, I hear. Then there are the Zyrians. They tend to keep clear of the settlements but sometimes you might see them working as drivers or porters and such like. They do a bit of trapping too, when they are sober; which is hardly ever. And then there are the Yakuts. Travelling folk, they are, but you probably won’t see any of them. They tend to stay well out to the east. Brilliant blacksmiths, though. They can shoe a horse faster than you can shit. All the same, I wouldn’t go near any of them if I were you; Ostyaks, Zyrians or Yakuts. Poxed to the gills, they are, and dangerous with it.”

  “Dangerous? How?”

  “Well, it’s the drink, mainly. I mean, you’ve got to drink up there, you’ll find that out. But they get desperate on it. They’ll do anything to get a bottle. They’ll kill you for your boots if you gave them a chance. Especially yours.”

  Trotsky smiled as his feet moved guiltily beneath the thick horsehair rug.

  “Whassat?” snarled the driver suddenly as he sent the whip lashing out across the straining backs of the team.

  “I was just telling our young friend here to watch out for the Ostyak women.”

  “Pah! Ostyaks!” sniffed the driver disdainfully. “No better than animals, most of them. Not fit for the likes of you, poet.”

  “I’m not a poet,” repeated Trotsky.

  Ignoring him, the driver reached down again and grasped the neck of the stone bottle. This time, as he drank, two small rivulets of vodka flowed down either side of his bearded lower jaw and he quickly wiped the long furry arm of his sleeve across his mouth before the liquor had time to freeze.

  “Don’t want to get mixed up with them,” he warned. “Knew a bloke once, an exile he was just like you, who had one right out in the middle of the Taiga. There were both drunk, see, and afterwards, of course, he was tired and she was tired so they both fell fast asleep, like you do. And when they woke up, they found they were both frozen together. Honest to God, it’s true! Frozen like a fucking fish in a pond, it was. Anyway, who should come along but her husband. Well, of course, at first he was none too pleased, though God knows he would probably have sold her for a couple of bottles, like all Ostyaks. In the end, the exile promises the husband something… gold or something, I forget. So he does the decent thing.”

  “Which was?” asked Trotsky.

  “He builds a fire and boils up some water from the snow. And when the water was good and scolding hot, he pours it all over the exile’s balls and what-not until it melted the ice.”

  Trotsky winced.

  “That was good of him.”

  “Yeah, well,” admitted the driver reluctantly. “Some of them aren’t all bad, I suppose.”

  “Sometimes,” broke in the soldier, “when our boys get taken short on patrol and have to have a piss, they get frostbite. We always pour vodka on it. Works every time.”

  “Oh yes,” agreed the driver, “I’ve done that too. But you would never get an Ostyak to do that. Waste of good booze, that would be. Specially,” he added with a crooked grin, “on someone who’s just been poking your wife.”

  The soldier laughed and even Trotsky found himself smiling at the driver’s words.

  “I suppose you see quite a lot of funny sights in your line,” said the driver as he passed the bottle to the guard. “Were you out East?”

  “Yes and glad to be back, I can tell you,” the guard replied.

  “What are they like then? The Eastern women. I mean, are they different or what?”

  Grinning, the soldier drank deeply.

  “Lovely things, they are,” he said with a smack of his lips. “Their men are undersized; can’t be compared to real men. But the women are beautiful. White and plump… you know?”

  “Well then,” prompted the driver. “Did our fellows… you know… take up with the Chinese girls?”

  “No,” the soldier told him regretfully. “Not allowed to, see? First, they take the Chinese women away, then they let the troops in. Still, some of our crowd caught a Chink girl in a maize field and had a go. And one of them left his cap there.”

  He took another swig and passed the bottle to Trotsky.

  “So the Chinky headman,” he continued, “brings the cap along and shows it to our officer. He lines up the whole camp and asks: ‘Whose cap?’”

  Putting his pipe back in his mouth, he puffed thoughtfully on it.

  “What happened, then?” asked the driver

  The pipe had gone out. Only after he had rummaged in his coat pocket and found his matches did he continue.

  “Nobody makes a sound. Better to lose your cap than get into that sort of trouble, see? In the end it all came to nothing. But the Chinese women are lovely.”

  Still puffing on his pipe, the soldier fell silent, his gaze far away as he thought over the incident.

  Trotsky held the stone bottle upright on his lap and stared sourly out of the sleigh. The forest was closer now and he could make out the first few trees that stood out from the main body of the forest, as if they had taken a few steps forward to meet them. Without bothering to wipe the top of the bottle, he lifted it and drank. The stone bottle felt appreciably lighter than it had done before. Suddenly, he realized that he was a little drunk. He grunted in surprise to himself, as if the possibility had not previously occurred to him, and, out of a mixture of bravado and self-pity, took another slug of the noxious spirit. He was twenty-six years old, he thought, and on his way to the Arctic Circle guarded by an armed rapist and a pony molester.

  A loud belch escaped his lips, and he looked accusingly at the bottle. With an effort, he leaned forward and nudged the driver’s back. Without turning his head, the driver took the bottle and stowed it under the driving board. There it stayed as he wrestled with the reins, slowing the team of horses down as they entered the forest.

  The passing trees blurred Trotsky’s vision, making him feel slightly sick. He tried closing his eyes but
that only made it worse, so he sat up straighter in the high backed seat and contented himself with staring up at the narrow corridor of the dull leaden sky framed by the tree tops. His clothing seemed to restrict him; he felt hot and flushed. A terrible fear – that he would vomit up the vodka in front of the guard and driver, that they would laugh at him – filled him with horror. Everybody in the train of sleighs trailing behind them would know. Blinking rapidly, he tried to concentrate, loosening the lapels of his thick greatcoat and opening the collar of his prison blouse, allowing the freezing air to refresh him. But the feeling, while it did not increase, still remained.

  It was partly due to the alcohol, he reasoned, and partly due to his own organism’s revulsion and disgust at the decadent characters of his two companions in the sleigh. The idea of rape, especially ‘official’ rape, had always scared him, making him feel uncomfortable with his own sex. It was, if not the ultimate weapon of the Autocracy, then its ultimate blasphemy: the arrogant flouting of power over its helpless victims. Inbuilt into the brutal code of conduct of the armed forces and the Cossacks was their belief that those who were against them forfeited any humane consideration. And since sex, as much as money, and physical force were a part of human relationships – tools that could be used to apply pressure – then it too formed part of the armoury of oppression; just as much as the noose and the knout. The violation of the body was the ultimate physical sacrilege and it could be applied to either gender. The male member could become in turn a skin-covered lever, a crowbar, a bludgeon.

  In his mind’s eye he could see the group of soldiers running through the field, closing in on the young Chinese girl and dragging her down; tearing the clothes off her twisting body. Pinning her arms and legs to the ground and gagging her mouth so that her terrified screams could no longer soar in jagged lines above the waving ears of corn up to the deep blue skies. Gagging her tear-stained mouth with perhaps a hastily snatched off military cap…

  There was no difference between those soldiers (which had, he did not doubt, included his own guard), who represented all that the bourgeoisie thought decent and upright in Russia, and those swine whose repeated nocturnal assaults had driven poor Liebovich to pour kerosene onto his bed in the jail at Odessa then fling himself upon it with a lighted match. Or had forced that strangely named sailor, one of the Kronstadt mutineers (what was his name? Arnold? Yes, Arnold), to hang himself in the Kruze Prison. No man who had lain awake at night in a prison cell, listening to the blows and coarse laughter of the night visitors in the adjoining cell next door and the victim’s hoarse shouts for help in his agony, could ever be untouched by the stories of rape that followed a visit of the Cossacks or the Black Hundred gangs. No man could, unless he had become a beast himself, and he, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, had not yet become that.

  Slowly, he closed his eyes.

  So few women fought back, he thought miserably.

  It was understandable, of course. Physically weaker; subject to millennia of repression and conditioning; forever divorced from the control of the means of production and prey to opportunists within their own ranks. They needed a leader.

  Perhaps I should write something, he thought.

  Why shouldn’t he? The book on Freemasonry was already finished – he had been about to correct the final draft when the news had come from Petersburg – and the manuscript of his book on Rent he had worked on in prison was safe with his lawyer. It might be over a year before he could get free from Obdorskoye. At least he should start making some notes. Nothing too theoretical; something along the lines of a primer perhaps, with a selection of brief biographies of famous women revolutionaries, starting with Mariya Vetrova who had burned herself to death in her cell in the Peter and Paul fortress in ’97.

  Ah, but there… there lay the problem. After centuries of beatings and subjugation, to rouse women to action would be difficult enough; but then to make them see the necessity of accepting the new discipline that the struggle demanded called for a very special approach. Once mobilised, the great constituency of women must inevitably change the values and practice of party discourse, and multiply the already numerous points of disagreement. True, the majority of women could be expected to shy away from Nicolai’s dictatorial precepts, which would be no bad thing. The bolshiviki would remain menschiviki forever. But once Nicolai had been defeated, what then? Trying to whip the women into line would be like trying to cap a volcano.

  His eyes still closed, Trotsky frowned. Without needing to ask, he knew how his senior comrades felt on the matter: women would spoil things. Women had the inner need endlessly to debate and re-examine past decisions and to hesitate and defer to one another until there was an overwhelming consensus for action. The trouble was, there were too few women like that young Dutch girl, Rosa, who had visited him in the prison before the trial.

  Now there was an old head on young shoulders, he thought approvingly.

  The fact remained that women, who often represented half of the work force, did not have a loud enough voice in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Where was the vigour and resilience that had been shown by the women in the Moscow textile factories? And so many of the women that were party members seemed distracted: the younger ones by what they could do to the world; the older women by what the world had done to them. Hardly the stuff that heroines were made of. Inspired by the historical example of Vera Figner, too many activists who could have joined the RSDLP had turned to the Social Revolutionaries and the gun. Women like Anna Smirnoff, who had been stripped naked and flogged in the street, the December snowflakes settling lightly on each welt raised by the sergeant’s knout. Women like Maria Spiridonova who had witnessed Luchenovsky, Governor of Tamboff, mounted on his fine black charger like Ivan Redhand, applauding the sight of the Cossack troop attacking her village.

  Maria Spiridonova had seen his nod of approval as the soldiers had dragged the younger women (only schoolgirls, some of them) out into the roadways and raped them in front of him. Maria Spiridonova had watched it all and had never forgotten. Her spirit had burnt like a slow fuse, allowing her to calmly plan her revenge. To obtain the shabby workingman’s clothes for her disguise, and from somewhere else (she never said where) a revolver with five bullets. To stalk the governor’s party for days, waiting for her moment to come at the railway station just as he was boarding the ten o’clock morning train to Moscow. Surrounded by fawning local dignitaries and placemen, he had paid no attention to the scruffily dressed young figure making its way along the edge of the platform. With the crowds and the noisy approach of the incoming train, it was doubtful he even realised what was happening. Then the pistol was bucking in Maria’s fist, shaking her arm so that she had to drop the bundle which she had used to mask it and use both hands to fire the third and fourth shots into his side and back. She had deliberately saved the last bullet for herself, but, like an amateur, she had allowed her weapon to be knocked from her hand before she could raise the smoking barrel to her temple. She had fallen under the flurry of blows and punches that winded her and bloodied her nose and in falling, her cap had been torn from her head to reveal her long brown hair.

  “It’s only a girl!” the crowd of scared, frock-coated gentlemen had cried angrily. “Just a girl!”

  The sight of her beautiful hair had infuriated them. They grabbed it, tore it out by handfuls, used it to drag her to the station waiting room where she was placed in the custody of the governor’s military escort that had suddenly materialised; too late to save the man whose life they had been charged to protect, but in time to make the best job of what they had left. Barring the door and closing the shutters of the waiting room windows, they exacted their revenge on the governor’s assassin.

  They began the interrogation of Maria Spiridonova by stripping her of her disguise. In the semi-darkness the naked pinkness of the voluptuous body that emerged from the rags had silenced them. Here was no ordinary pug-faced terrorist, but a young woman of quite outstanding physical beaut
y. The burly uniformed men circled her, pulling her hands away from those parts of her body she sought to protect. When she persisted, they tied her hands behind her back and began turning her round; pushing her first this way and that, to show off her best points. Almost by the way, they continued to question her; keeping up the charade of legitimate investigation as their excitement mounted. Twisting and turning to face each of them she stumbled and fell, was dragged up again by her hair (such fine hair, they kept saying, the hair of a real lady) then forced once more onto her knees.

  Someone slapped her once, and then again. This slapping seemed to break a spell: she could be touched. At first squeezing, then pinching and finally clawing, their rough hands left welts on her breasts, thighs and buttocks. From the floor she was lifted like a doll and placed on the waiting room table, where she was bound securely by thick artillery belts. Someone produced a flask of vodka. The onlookers passed round cigars and began to smoke.

  The hands returned, pinching, squeezing, making her squirm. Still she refused to talk. They began slapping her again, then punching her. Loosening the belts, they threw her onto the floor and kicked her from one side of the room to the other. Then she was put back on the table again. Their calloused hands and roughened nails raked her breasts. Eventually tiring of their sport, her interrogators stepped back and allowed the others in the room to try their skill. When they began burning her nipples with their half smoked cigars, she fainted. Buckets of cold water were collected from the tap on the station platform. They revived her and began again.

  * * *

  The interrogation took the rest of the morning and all the afternoon. That evening, she was carried onto the last train to Moscow, accompanied by an officer and two guards. The officer made sure that they had a compartment to themselves. During the night, they raped her repeatedly; the officer went first. Gagged and bound, she went beyond life, into that limbo which is not death, yet is not of this world; the land of the tortured.