by A J Allen
She was still alive when they reached Moscow the following morning. So horrific were her injuries that when she was taken to the prison, she was immediately put into solitary confinement in the hospital wing. After a few months she was sent to Yakutsk. There was no trial but, because her case had attracted the interest of the international press, she was kept alive, although once more in solitary confinement. More months had passed until an inquisitive American journalist became intrigued by her disappearance. He was able to bribe her gaolers and secure a brief interview.
First appearing in the American newspapers, his horrified account of her story travelled back, via London, Paris, Berlin to St. Petersburg. Despite the public outcry, the security services stood firm: Maria Spiridonova was a Russian citizen. It was an internal matter which, in due course, might or might not be investigated. She remained in jail, the symptoms of the syphilis that she had contracted during her rapes visibly deteriorating her health. The journalist had described her appearance as that of a careworn woman in her mid-sixties. She was twenty-three years old.
And there were others like her; women of unquestionable bravery and principle who, goaded beyond endurance by the repeated injustices, the endless repression, the corruption and the massacres, had calmly and deliberately risen from their piano practice or had put down their needlepoint, or taken off their artist’s smocks, joined the Essers and steeped their arms in blood so that the iniquities of the tyrant would not go unavenged. But, as the cult of assassination grew, the evidence of the effectiveness of the propaganda of the deed became more questionable. Individual terrorism, the main platform of the Essers, had become counter-revolutionary. One state functionary was replaced by another and his guard doubled. It negated the important role of the organised proletariat, the fountainhead of real power, and the necessity of discipline that was essential if things were genuinely to change.
Yet, the attraction of the deed – the cathartic effect of the bomb blast and the crack of the pistol shot – could not be denied. How uncomfortable it made the honest law-abiding bourgeois gentlemen on the St. Petersburg Express, peering over the tops of their morning newspapers at the pale-faced young woman sitting in the corner seat. They looked at her stern features, her sober dress, her air of quiet certainty and wondered… Who is she? What is her journey? A respectable governess travelling to the capital to take up a new position? The granddaughter of a retired general perhaps, returning to her studies at the conservatoire? Or a latter day Spiridonova nervous in her travelling clothes, gripping the large reticule containing the kitchen knife or heavy pistol that will soon bring the inglorious career of another minister to a sudden end?
Trotsky felt a blow on his left arm. Annoyed by the interruption to his thoughts, he opened his eyes and looked blearily at his guard. The soldier was offering him the stone bottle again. The very thought of the noxious liquor made his stomach turn. Pulling a face, Trotsky feebly pushed the bottle away and settled his head against the hard wooden arm of the seat, gathering up the travelling skins that had slipped down his chest. With a shrug, the soldier took another draught then passed the bottle back to the driver.
Trotsky’s lips curled in disgust as he closed his eyes again. Disgust at his travelling companions, at the taste of the alcohol on his tongue and, most of all, disgust with himself. How could he even think himself capable of writing a book that would address the female case? Behind his closed eyes, the figure of Vera Zasulich arose and admonished him. He had even forgotten Vera Zasulich! The young woman who had put a bullet in General Trepoff and then surrendered without a struggle, determined as he, Trotsky, had been, to face her accusers in open court. She had been the greatest of them all, the paragon of revolutionary virtue. But how desperately disappointing it had been to meet her face to face. Vera still believed in a gentleman’s revolution, where the untutored masses would rise and subside obediently, forgetting how the real waves of the sea smash and drag, unless channelled and dammed. He wondered where she was now.
Opening his eyes again, Trotsky peered out into the deepening gloom of the forest. The warm flush of the alcohol had passed, to be replaced by a chill deep in his bones that made him wrap his overcoat tighter around himself. His body ached from the journey of the sleigh, his head ached from the foul liquor, he was desperately tired, and his stomach craved food. How much longer could it be, he wondered, before they reached their destination? A week? A fortnight? Perhaps even a month? He had heard that there would be one further break in the journey: a few days’ rest at the place called Berezovo, but beyond that lay the unknown.
Maybe the driver was right. Somewhere on the road ahead lay his extinction; first political, then moral and finally physical. He smiled bitterly at the thought of how his first wife, Alexandra, would laugh when she heard the news of his death.
Chapter Six
Thursday 1st February 1907
Berezovo, Northern Siberia
On the afternoon of the day following Madame Wrenskaya’s ‘at home’, Yeliena Tortsova sat sewing in the comfortable drawing room of her house at Number 8, Ostermann Street. She resented the tedium of her task, but Katya’s needlework could not be trusted and her husband could not afford to pay for the services of Lev Polezhayev or his daughter every time a hem needed catching or a button replacing. Money, or the lack of it, was preying on her mind. Her anxiety had been exacerbated by the knowledge that this was one of the few subjects that Vasili stubbornly refused to discuss with her, despite the high probability that she would outlive him.
Nature dictated that a man was destined for a short life of activity and accumulation, whereas a woman had to endure a longer existence of subservience and expenditure. In her own case, this natural discrepancy was further widened by the difference between their ages: soon it would be the doctor’s fifty-sixth birthday, while she was only thirty-five. And, as if these two factors were not enough, her husband’s profession demanded that he should encounter danger and risk infection more often than men half his age. Who else in Berezovo travelled such vast distances, alone, in the depths of winter, visiting the breeding grounds of disease? Madame Wrenskaya’s observation the previous day about the need to prepare for her husband’s succession had robbed Yeliena of several hours’ sleep. No reasonable woman, given her health, could expect to die before such a husband.
Yeliena sighed. The problem vexed her. She knew from experience that any attempt to discover exactly what her financial position would be in the event of the doctor’s passing was fruitless. However logical her argument Vasili would dismiss her fears as being groundless, even hysterical. Quite simply, it was a man’s duty to provide for his wife’s welfare: to question his competence to do so was to insult his essence. To date, the best she had managed to wring from him was a vague and ill-tempered promise that she would be ‘taken care of’. There was a small mortgage on the house; she knew that much. Besides that, and the normal accounts of day-to-day living, she knew of no outstanding debts. But regarding any speculative investments her husband might have made or the existence of any monies that might accrue from an insurance policy held in his name, or even the value of his pension (should he be awarded one), she was completely ignorant.
Pausing in her needlework, she straightened her back, her tired eyes blinking in the pale amber light cast by the lamp on the table beside her. She would ask him, when the time was right. A man did not want to be pestered about money the moment he had returned from a long and arduous journey.
Bowing her head once more, she resumed her sewing, plunging the needle through the worn fabric of the petticoat she was mending as she rehearsed the points of her argument. In one corner of the room, beside the bookshelves sagging under the weight of the bound volumes of medical journals and the doctor’s beloved Turgenev, a black tortoise stove radiated its life-giving heat and in the small iron hearth two logs, neatly sawn at the mill behind Kavelin’s yard, crackled and hissed on their bed of precious Ural coals. Above the hearth, in the centre of a narrow ledge
of darkly varnished wood that served as a mantelpiece, the ticking of a black ormolu clock paused, gathering itself up before striking the hour of four o’ clock.
The sound of its chimes brought Yeliena’s head up again. Her frown of concern gave her face the appearance of what a stranger could be forgiven for mistaking as irritation. Just as the fourth hour struck, she heard the click of the latch on the back door and Katya’s heavy footsteps as she entered the kitchen. Before the next hour struck, night would reclaim its kingdom, held in brief abeyance for the eight hours and forty-seven minutes that, for the want of a better word, the inhabitants of Berezovo called day. A month, two months from now, the boredom of these brief days and long nights would be a dreary memory; their barrenness forgotten with the promise of the approaching thaw. But, until then, there was little for her or any other woman in Berezovo to do except tend her family, keep her home and entertain herself.
And some stoop to mischief, reflected Yeliena as her thoughts turned from her own situation to the behaviour of Irena Kuibysheva.
When she had first heard the rumours (where else but across the counter at Pavel Nadnikov’s general store?) she had dismissed them as gossip, but having watched the two women sitting side by side at Anastasia Christianovna’s the previous day she had become convinced that the shop girl had been telling the truth. While Illya Kuibyshev was away in Tobolsk ostensibly negotiating a new contract for furs with government officials – although no one in the town doubted that he also kept a woman there, if not two; he could afford it – his young wife had been seen drinking hot chocolate in the public dining room of the Hotel New Century with Leonid Kavelin, the husband of her closest friend Tatyana Kavelina. There was, as yet, no tangible evidence of conspiracy but Yeliena’s instincts told her that there was no smoke without fire. There had been something behind Irena Kuibysheva’s eyes, a sense of sly pleasure and legerdemain, that betrayed her manner for what it was: a performance designed to hoodwink her close audience. She wondered now whether Madame Wrenskaya had also sensed this aura of deception.
Tatyana Kavelina had little cause to complain of her situation, she reckoned. Leonid Kavelin was not a very interesting man and, as his wife, Tatyana already had everything the material world could offer: wealth, position, children… three children: a daughter she kept close to her at home and two boys, boarding at the seminary outside Tiumeni. Having mourned the death of her own son, she was at a loss to understand how any mother – however unnatural – could allow her children to be delivered into the hands of strangers for her own personal convenience.
Yet, despite her disapproval, Yeliena could not help but feel sorry for Tatyana Kavelina for the ordeal that assuredly lay before her. Once, a long time ago now, she had found herself in a similar position. She too had once suffered from the same sickening mixture of shame and misery when a lover had been lured away from her. The memory of those wretched days would not allow her to enjoy Tatyana Kavelina’s misfortune or to dismiss her grief as a scrap of no importance. She could remember how the sickening desire for retribution had clawed like a cat inside her stomach and had almost overpowered her, until she thought that she would either go mad or die from the misery. But her rage had been impotent; her fantasies of cruel revenge febrile daydreams. She had survived, as her parents had told her she would, but less gay and less trusting. Deep within her, she still bore the scars and had come to terms with the consequences. For the next man who had courted her, and whose offer of marriage she had ultimately accepted, had been as different from her first beaux as could possibly be. It was inconceivable that Doctor Tortsov would look at another woman, simply because he did not care enough to. The great love in his life was, and would always be, his work.
This was not to say that Vasili did not love her in his own way, or that their marriage had been joyless. Yeliena was certain that if she suddenly took ill and died, Vasili would genuinely mourn her; but he would not pine away. She doubted if he would even blame himself for having failed to save her. Instead, he would tell himself that he had treated her just as he would have treated others: to the best of his ability. After a short time of sadness he would go on as before, battling against his ancient enemy. If, however, the situation was reversed and something happened to him – a major misfortune that would render his continuance of his medical practice impossible, a bad fall perhaps or an apoplexy – then whatever she could do would not be sufficient to keep him alive. Within a six-month period, her husband would have fretted and fidgeted his way into the graveyard beside the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. While other men worked to live, the doctor lived for his work. The irony of her fate was not lost on her. She had been granted her most devout wish: she had a completely faithful husband. She had no cause to fear that another woman might succeed in winning his heart where she had failed. In this she was more fortunate even than the richest man in town, Illya Tarpelovich Kuibyshev, whose own wife sought solace during his absences by defiling her marriage vows.
Just thinking about the younger woman filled Yeliena with anger. It was not as if Irena Kuibysheva was even constant to her lovers. Two years ago it had been the young merchant Dobrovolsky. More recently, the previous summer, Captain Steklov, who was barely more than a boy himself. Now she had grown tired of chasing her young cavalry officer, it was to be Kavelin’s turn. A weak, vain man with a tiresome wife, there was little chance that he would rebuff her. Already, Yeliena knew how the affair would end. Tatyana Kavelina would be heartbroken, Illya Kuibyshev would return and Kavelin would join the growing band of men whose reputation Irena Kuibysheva had polluted. For, if one thing was certain under heaven, it was that Irena Kuibysheva would never leave the man who had so unwisely taken her as his wife and in whose marriage bed she doubtless took good care to give as much pleasure as she stole from others. She was bezobrazie, a disgrace.
As if sewing the final stitch in the adulteress’s shroud, Yeliena plunged the needle through the petticoat for the last time, made a knot and, with a sharp tug, snapped the thread. Pinning the needle into the lid of her cane work basket, she held up the garment and cast a critical eye over the mended hem. The stitches were neat enough and the hem level. With a sigh, she folded the petticoat and draped it over the arm of her armchair. Standing up, she stretched her arms, feeling the stiffness in her back. There was a quiet knock at the door and as she turned, Katya entered the room carrying a plate of sweet cakes.
“Are those for the doctor, Katya?”
“Yes, mum.”
“You may leave them on the table and set an extra place. Anton Ivanovich will be joining us shortly. I shall take the doctor a glass of tea myself.”
The girl hesitated for a few seconds, as if confused by the complexity of her new instructions, and then obeyed. Taking the plate from her, Yeliena placed it on the small circular tea table and began drawing off a glass of tea from the samovar.
“Oh, and bring another lamp, will you?” she added. “This room seems so sad this afternoon.”
“Yes mum.”
Carrying the glass of tea, Yeliena walked slowly out into the hall and began climbing the dimly lit staircase. When she had reached the larger of the two bedrooms that occupied the first floor of the house, Yeliena stood in the doorway for a moment, listening to the shallow whisper of her husband’s breathing. Silently, she lowered the glass of tea onto the polished cabinet that stood beside the doctor’s bed, setting it down beside his gold-rimmed spectacles, his fob watch and chain and a small ornate bedside lamp. She debated whether to light the lamp and decided against it. She would let him have a few more minutes’ sleep before she woke him. Instead she quietly walked past him and stood at the foot of the bed, looking out through the window at the large house across the street. The familiar feeling of sadness and dread descended upon her, as if somehow she had come not to rouse Vasili but to say goodbye.
Turning, she looked down at the sleeping figure on the bed. She saw a man in his fifty-fifth year, of middling height with a
lined, careworn face, oval in shape and pale in complexion. Except for his shoes, he lay fully clothed beneath the thick top blanket; his head thrown back in exhaustion. His grey hair was greasy and lank after days of wearing the fur cap made for him by a grateful hunter. Noticing that his hair needed cutting, she made a mental note also to trim the silver streaked beard that sprang from his chin. On either side of the bridge of his nose, wine-coloured indentations showed where his spectacles had bruised his flesh. Below, his lips sagged downwards as he slept, revealing a row of uneven tobacco stained teeth. Tiny white flecks of spittle lay in the corner of his slack mouth. There was little else to see: the stiff wings of his collar poking over an untidy cravat; the dark sombre blue of his waistcoat against the creased white cloth of his shirt. She had never seen him completely naked, nor was she curious to do so. She knew the slender shoulders and the scrawny arms to be strong enough to lift a man unaided or to hold down a woman in labour. She dimly remembered the hard sharpness of his elbows and his knees, the weight of his body when he had last come to her for loving.
She moved nearer. Second by second, the room was growing perceptibly darker and she watched as his face gradually became an indistinguishable blur against his pillow. It was time to wake him yet, in the act of reaching out to touch him, she stayed her hand; savouring the last seconds of uncomplicated peace.
If only I could tell him how I have felt, she thought to herself. Now, while he is still sleeping, so that he might wake with some understanding.
She knew how it would be. Once he was awake, the spell would be broken. All her carefully rehearsed phrases, her questions and observations would be brushed aside as he once more took command of the household. If only she could tell him just one thing… But she couldn’t. He had returned and life would be better and at the same time worse until the next time he went away.