Berezovo

by A J Allen

  He began to struggle feebly, his temples breaking out in a cold sweat as he found that he could not move. It seemed that his body was trapped in some terrible vice. Hanging head downwards, his naked hindquarters were exposed in a way that made him defenceless. By careful experimentation, he found that he could move his head a few degrees to the left or right but, in doing so, he made the mistake of inhaling some of the dust that lay in thick balls under the iron bedstead. Unable to raise either of his arms which were pinned to his side to brush the dust away, he sneezed violently five or six times, each sneeze forcing his body deeper into the gap. From somewhere above him he heard the rasp of a match being struck. He went cold with fear. What was going to happen to him next?

  The darkness became perceptibly lighter; someone had lit a candle. Instinctively he began to relax as the memory of the afternoon’s lovemaking flooded back to him.

  “Masha?” he called hopefully.

  Holding the candle high over the bed, Matriona Pobednyeva studied the two large dimpled buttocks that were all that were visible of her husband.

  “So,” she observed drily, “it speaks.”

  “Matriona, help me up will you?”

  Lowering the candle onto the bedside table, she stooped and she picked up her discarded clothes.

  “So why should I?” she demanded as she began to dress.

  “For God’s sake, help me. I can’t breathe.”

  “How do I know that you don’t have a woman down there?”

  “Masha, I’m warning you!”

  She grinned at the quivering cheeks as he struggled vainly to extricate himself.

  “Perhaps I would prefer to dine with Modest Andreyevich alone. We could talk about all sorts of things. Like how he murdered his wife, for instance. Poor woman!”

  “That was never proved!” came the muffled reply.

  “Everybody knows that he killed her, Tolly. And you invite him into our house and expect me to be polite to him.”

  “She was very ill, even before she went into the hospital,” insisted the voice. “She had the best available treatment. A private room, everything.”

  “Yes!” Matriona Pobednyeva said grimly, nodding at the wriggling bottom. “Just so that he could poison her in peace, you mean.”

  “Masha, please!” her husband groaned in despair. “All the blood is rushing to my head.”

  Madame Pobednyev fastened the last of her buttons on the high necked blouse and smoothed down the front of her creased skirt. With a last look round to see if she had forgotten anything, she bent stiffly at the waist and, grasping the foot of the iron bedstead, pulled the whole bed six inches towards her. It wasn’t much but it was sufficient to allow Pobednyev to struggle to his feet and shuffle unsteadily out of the narrow defile in which he had been trapped. As he emerged at the end of the bed, his movements hampered by the voluminous folds of his trousers that concertinaed around his ankles, she shook her head despairingly.

  “Look at it. My husband the Mayor!” she jeered. “If only the council could see you now.”

  Hastily, he bent down and pulled up his trousers in an attempt to salvage some shred of dignity.

  “Now look here, Matriona,” he began angrily.

  “No!” she interrupted him, advancing on him as she waved an accusing finger at him. “You look here! Because of all your high jinks, I’m all behind with the preparations for dinner. Though why I should be expected to feed that monster is beyond me. So don’t waste your time dreaming up any more of your fine speeches. I want you downstairs as soon as you’re dressed and ready to meet the Beast. Until then, I won’t feel safe from him.”

  Turning to go, she glanced meaningfully down at his unbuttoned fly and added, “Or from you.”

  Anatoli Mikhailovich stared glumly at her retreating back. As soon as she had closed the door behind her, he made an obscene gesture at the wall and sat down heavily on the side of the bed.

  What a tongue that woman has, he thought. It would serve her right if Tolkach does poison her.

  All the same, it was useful to be reminded that a cloud of suspicion still hung over the Hospital Administrator. And his dear wife wasn’t the only person to nurture a secret desire for civic recognition. Ever since Kostya Izorov had informed him about the convoy, he had felt that the time had come to put a long nurtured plan into operation. A plan that was in every sense of the word monumental. And Modest Tolkach was just the man to help him.

  Chapter Eight

  Friday 2 February 1907

  Great Tobolsk Highway

  2 February, evening. Demyanskoye.

  Despite the fact that the red banner which greeted us at Yurovskoye yesterday was seized by the troops, this morning, as we were leaving the village, there was a new one stuck on a long pole into a snowdrift. This time nobody touched it; the soldiers had only just settled into their sleighs and no one felt like getting out again. And so we paraded past it. Further on, a few hundred yards from the village, where the road dips down to the river, we saw an inscription in huge letters on the snowy slope: ‘Long Live the Revolution!’ My driver, a fellow of eighteen or so, burst out laughing when Leon he read the inscription. “Do you know what that means – long live the revolution?” I asked him. “No, I don’t,” he said after a moment’s thought, “all I know is that people keep shouting these words, ‘Long Live the Revolution!’” But you could tell by his face that he knew more than he was prepared to say. Altogether the local peasants, especially the young ones, are extremely well disposed towards the ‘politicals’.

  We arrived at Demyanskoye, the large village where we are stopping for the night, at 1:00 p.m. A large crowd of exiles came to meet us (there are more than sixty here). This caused great confusion among some of our escort. The corporal at once gathered his faithful around him in case of need. Luckily there was no trouble. It was obvious that they had been waiting for us here for a long time and with a good deal of nervous tension. A special commission to organize our reception had been appointed. A magnificent dinner and comfortable quarters were prepared in the local “commune”. But we were not allowed to go there, and had to stop in a peasant house; the dinner was brought here. Meeting the politicals is extremely difficult; they were able to get in to see us only for a few minutes at a time, in twos and threes, carrying various parts of the dinner. Apart from that we took turns to visit the local shop, accompanied by soldiers, and on the way were able to exchange a few words with comrades who waited in the street all day long.

  “Tell her about the woman,” said Sverchkov, who had been reading over Trotsky’s shoulder what he was writing.

  “She won’t want to read about that.”

  “Yes she will. People like reading about themselves, or people like themselves.”

  Trotsky turned and, smiling up at Sverchkov, acknowledged with a nod of his head the truth of what his comrade had said. They had shared the same privations at the Peter-Paul Fortress and at the House of Preliminary Detention and he had become used to finding Sverchkov at his side. It was, he knew, personal admiration masquerading as comradeship, and slightly embarrassing. At the same time, it felt odd to have one’s steps dogged by another man who was willing to fetch and run errands, instead of waiting to arrest him.

  My own little Flemish, he thought fondly.

  “Shall I get you some tea?” suggested Sverchkov.

  “Thank you Dimitri, that would be very kind. And I will see what words I can conjure up to describe our situation.”

  Folding the piece of notepaper on his knee Trotsky resumed his letter to Natalya.

  One of the women exiles, dressed up as a peasant woman, came to sell us milk; she played her part very well, but the owner of the house must have given her away to the soldiers and they immediately forced her to leave. The corporal was on duty at the time, worse luck. I remember how our little colony at Ust-Kut (on the Lena) used to prepare for the passage of every new lot of exiles: we tried to cook shchi, make pelmeni, in short we did exactly what the
people at Demyanskoye did for us today. The passage of a large batch of exiles is a tremendous event for every little colony along the route, all of whose members are impatient for news from home.

  Realising his mistake, Trotsky stopped writing. He had been with Alexandra at Ust-Kut, not Natalya. He considered the problem. He had only one piece of paper and he had written sufficient to merit the letter. If he crossed out the offending line she would only wonder what the bit was he had said. It would be better to leave it be; she would understand that his use of ‘our’ and ‘we’ had meant no disrespect to her. Alexandra Sokolovskaya and Natalya Sedova, he thought contentedly. They could not be more different.

  The last memory he had of his wife Alexandra was of her sitting in the living area of their two small rooms in Verkholensk, cradling their four month old daughter Nina on her lap. In the room above, a mound of straw lay artfully arranged on his bed covered by the stained blanket that lent it the contours of a sleeping body. Alexandra had refused to look at him as he stood before her, making his clumsy speech of justification. All her passion had long been spent.

  “Just get out,” she had told him. “Just go.”

  The tears had been in his eyes, and not hers, as he had blundered out through their doorway and ran to the cart at the back of the merchant’s shop. He had had no illusions. With Zina two years old and Nina still at her breast, she would be open to any pressure that the authorities might care to apply. Eventually the police court had awarded Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya a further four years of exile for not reporting his escape. This, added to the original sentence of four years and then all those months in jail prior to their trial, accounted for nearly ten years of her life, and still she had not betrayed him or their comrades. Ten years, because she had trusted him and followed his lead. Undoubtedly Alexandra would smile at the news if he perished in Obdorskoye.

  Well, let her, he thought with an inner shrug. I am partly the man she made me.

  That summer, long ago in Shvigorsky’s market garden, it had been Alexandra that had brought him to Marxism, not the other way around. The five of them – Alexandra, her brothers Grigori and Illya, their friend Ziv and himself – would sit in the orchard on the hot dusty days and have interminable political discussions; he lying back and gazing at her body under half-closed eyelids as he listened to her brothers expound their latest theories. They had, indeed, all been poets then. He had read his verses aloud to them, hoping to impress her. If she was aware how much he had hungered for her, she had not shown it. Later she had told him that she had been unaware of his feelings, but he had never believed her.

  It wasn’t just because of the heavy swell of her breasts under her plain summer blouse, or the fact that she was eight years older than him, but something else. Resting his back against the wall of the peasant cottage in which he was now billeted, Trotsky recalled now that she had had not just a maturity but also a world view and an active commitment to something alive and active that he had envied. Alexandra would listen half contemptuously to their endless circular arguments with a knowing smile, as if distant and untouchable, and this had irked him greatly. Soon a pattern of their behaviour emerged. When challenged, she would give a sound Marxist response which would cause him, prompted by an involuntary reflex he could neither understand nor resist, immediately to jump up and deride her views. Her reaction was always the same: an uncaring shrug and her retirement from what she clearly saw as an unprofitable conversation.

  He had been so arrogant that for eighteen months, he had refused to embrace her views. There had been times, more times than could be counted, when she had almost believed he was ready but then he had slipped away, mocking ‘her’ Marx and her credulity. Apart from these advances and retreats, they had regarded each other mostly from a distance; he looking at her rounded voluptuous figure; she at the young man struggling to leave his childhood and family behind like an insect ripping itself from the larva, its skin still moist from the gum. She had waited patiently and, finally, without any trumpets or drama, it had happened.

  He’d woken one morning – he was now sleeping every night on the floor of Shvigorsky’s hut with some of the other ‘runaways’ – with the inner certainty that the Marxist position of how permanent and sustainable change could come about was the only one that made sense. Lying there beside his sleeping friends, he felt both shocked and gladdened by this sudden revelation. True, there was still so much that he did not understand, but that did not trouble him. What mattered was that he had found himself in a new world, transformed. He knew that while the other groups debated, it was the Marxists that were organising; not losing an hour, even a minute, in constructing their revolution. That is what he and his friends should be doing, instead of sitting round talking endlessly about things that they knew little about. Words without deeds was death.

  Ashamed now of the wasteful discussions in which he had revelled only the previous day, he made the decision to avoid the others and to spend the day by himself thinking things through. But so strong had been the impulse to share his good news that he had felt that he would burst if he didn’t tell someone.

  “So you are a Marxist now, are you?” Shvigorsky had said, leaning on his spade.

  The old man shook his head sadly.

  “How many times have I seen this? A piece of skirt comes through the door and political principles fly out the window.”

  He had protested hotly, as the wizened gardener, still laughing quietly to himself, had taken him gently but firmly by the arm and led him back to his friends who were sitting outside the hut, smoking cigarettes and watching the sunset. They too had all laughed when he told them his news. All except Alexandra who stood up and began walking away. She had fallen for this before and would not stay to hear her political views mocked. She believed that a woman’s views had a right to be considered as seriously as a man’s. This time he did not jeer at her, but followed her meekly through the orchard, ignoring her repeated requests to be left alone. Finally, she stopped and turned to face him, the evening light bathing her face, the scent of warm fruit all around them.

  “Alexandra,” he had pleaded, “honestly, I want to learn. I want to understand.”

  She had shown her reluctance. Why should she believe that he was not teasing her as he had so many times before?

  He had persisted, following her deeper into the orchard. Could he borrow some of her books? If he wrote out his thoughts on what he read, would she read them? He felt lost, he had said, catching up with her and taking her hand in his, noting how under the spreading boughs the dappled shadows of light played against her neck and cheek. Would she show him the way forward? Could she forgive him for all the stupid things he had said in the past? Above all, would she be his teacher?

  She had been the first. He fancied that he could still recall the warm perfume of her body; the pale smoothness of her shoulders that gleamed in the evening light; her gasping breath as he entered her; the delicious tingling pain as her fingernails, claws now, raked his bowed back. And then the final unburdening, the little death that marked the end of his long childhood. There in the orchard, lying next to her in the long grass heavy with the evening dew, with the sweat rapidly cooling on his body, he had taken his first breath as a man, and had smiled to himself, because Shvigorsky had been wrong after all. With Lev Davidovich Bronstein, politics came first; everything else followed after.

  That was the year that he had come to bloom. He had learnt so many things; mostly about himself. Once he had assumed the leadership of the Nikolayev group he found that he had less time to think about the importance of individuals and had to devote more time to the overall struggle. Alexandra still gave herself to him – they often worked late at the shed that housed the hectograph press – but it was unclear to him even then whether she was giving herself to him as a person or, on a more primitive level, to the leader of their pack. And, as the reputation of the cell spread (even reaching the ears of the founders of Iskra far beyond the Empire’s west
ern frontiers) he discovered that there was a type of woman who was attracted by the scent of leadership, however slight, in much the same way that a dog came to a whistle.

  That Alexandra knew of these infidelities he had long stopped doubting, although at the time he had been able to convince himself that she had been fooled by his excuses.

  Sex, politics and betrayal, he thought now as he waited for Dimitri Sverchkov to return. They go together like a sleigh and ponies.

  The most serious row he had ever had with Ziv, who he had suspected was himself half in love with Alexandra, had been not about theoretical points of doctrine but the danger posed by his infidelity. His promiscuity was irresponsible, Ziv had argued; a threat not only to himself but all who were connected with the South Russia Workers’ Union, as the group now called itself, as distinct from the moribund Union of Southern Russian Workers. What if Alexandra, stung by his unfaithfulness, informed the police that the shadowy master figure responsible for the purple inked leaflets and broadsheets that daily flooded the local factories was none other than the truant student L.D. Bronstein? What would he do then?

  He had dismissed the idea, confident that, whatever Alexandra might do, she would not sink to becoming an informer. But Ziv had persisted. If not Alexandra, what about her brothers? Had not Lev noticed a certain coolness had sprung up between them all? Either Illya or Grigori might be goaded by the thought of their sister’s betrayal into sending the police an anonymous note, and he would never know.

  This possibility had struck him as being more likely, and he had thought deeply about the matter after he had made his peace with Ziv. Alexandra would never betray him, he told himself, because in him she saw something that that she herself lacked: an inner fire that could not be doused by threat of punishment. But her brothers…

  Not for the first time did it occur to Trotsky that the process of creation had been markedly unequal to the allotment of personal courage. True, Alexandra had rejected the bourgeois concept of marriage and had now become the mistress of a young and increasingly effective agitator, but that was as far as she would go out of step with the world. Whereas for him, it was only the first stage. He felt a nameless ambition growing within him. He knew not where it was leading him; only that it would not permit him to ignore such a block to its progress.