Berezovo

by A J Allen

  “Turn around,” she ordered. “Face the wall. Keep your arms by your sides.”

  Assuming a nonchalance that he did not feel, Trotsky did as he was ordered, and gazed fixedly at the stained wallpaper. A faded pattern of roses was just discernible beneath the grime. Out of the corner of his right eye, he could see the doorway. It was empty; the man who had let them in had gone, taking with him the coat and jacket he had been lent in Zurich. From behind him came the sound of the knife cutting as Paul began working at the fabric of the suitcase. Trotsky waited patiently, savouring the smells of cooking that were filling the room. Closing his eyes, he longed for sleep.

  “Stand up straight!”

  He felt the woman’s eyes upon his back, taking in his uncut hair, his ill-mended and dusty shoes. He recognised her now: she was the Cerberus of the party; no one whose credentials did not satisfy her would be allowed access to the centre. And where was the centre? Somewhere else in the city, that seemed probable; not here, in this hole. He began to wonder what would happen if he had been a police agent in disguise. Certainly he would not have been permitted to leave the house alive; these people did not play children’s games with empty guns. There was little doubt in his mind that Paul’s knife was as capable of slitting throats as it was of slitting case linings. As if the Pole had read his thoughts, he heard the sound of the blade stop and the rustle of paper as the documents were removed. There was a pause, and then he was told to turn round.

  On the table, the clothes remained undisturbed. Beside them, the case gaped open, shreds of its lining draped over the sides like lolling tongues. Taking the bottle of Ticino with him, Paul left the room, patting Trotsky’s arm absentmindedly as he did so. Wearily, Trotsky turned to follow him but the woman stopped him.

  “Stay here, Comrade. In a moment Pavel will bring you a glass of wine and something to eat.”

  He watched as, with a sigh, she closed the lid of the sewing box and placed it carefully on the table beside her chair. Then, stiffly, she rose and stood for a moment, looking at him as if preoccupied with some inner thoughts. She seemed to reach some decision, for she took a pace forward and held, out her hand.

  “Bienevenue, Pero. Je suis Jaques.”

  Smiling at last, he had shaken her hand, relieved that his long journey was over. He noticed the dry strength of her grasp and the way that her eyes lost none of their shrewdness as she examined his face closely. He was later to realise that he had only passed through the first of many tests; success in all of which was imperative if he was to be given access to the headquarters of the party abroad.

  The house to which Paul had led him appeared to be some form of private boarding establishment, for there were numbers on each of the six bedrooms. However, during that first stay in Paris he had seen no other guests; a fact that had puzzled him until he had overheard the doorman inform a caller that they had illness in the house. Each day was the same. He spent most of the morning and afternoon either reading or resting in his room. In the evening, he would join Jaques in her sitting room and allow himself to be subjected to hours of questioning. Occasionally he would be allowed to go out, but always in the company of Paul.

  One evening, in the hope of once more catching sight of his beautiful stranger, Trotsky had persuaded the Pole to allow him to revisit the bar in the Rue Cavertin. Natalya had not appeared and Trotsky and Paul had spent the evening talking with the other émigrés.

  As the talk grew louder and the air in the bar turned beer stale and blue with cheap tobacco smoke, Trotsky found that their pessimism upset him, and he felt that he was drifting back and was once more amongst talkers and not doers. The exiles of Ust-Kut and Verkholensk, he told himself, had had more life in them than these uprooted creatures. It was as if he had climbed to the lip of the volcano and heard from its depths not fiery rhetoric, but the endless echo of ineffectual chatter. He became in turn suspicious, abrasive and, finally, rude. Even the prospect that Natalya might at any moment enter the bar did nothing to soothe his spirits. On the contrary, he could not have borne it if she had appeared while he was feeling in such a foul mood. He was relieved when Paul suggested that they return to Jaques, and he had used the kilometre back to the safe house to walk off some of his frustration.

  Reaching the house, they found Jaques waiting up for them. Trotsky had gone straight to his room (first storey back) that he shared with Paul and was sitting on the rough camp bed when he heard his hostess’s voice calling his name. Wearily, he rose and went downstairs, expecting to have to answer more questions about the South Russia Union and how it had collapsed. One look at the stern expression on Jaques’ face put him on his guard.

  She did not mince her words.

  “Paul tells me that you behaved in a very uncomradely way tonight. He says that, like a fool, you argued with everyone. You talked instead of listened.”

  Trotsky looked quickly at Paul, who was standing beside her chair. If he was expecting the Pole to look embarrassed, he was to be disappointed. In truth, the Pole looked very satisfied with himself and did not display any shame at his exposure as informant.

  “Well, do you have an explanation?” Jaques demanded. “I suppose you realise that you have endangered everybody here. You have drawn attention to yourself and therefore to this house. What made you behave so stupidly? Was it the drink? Was that it?”

  For the first time he had lost his temper with Jaques, piqued by the unfairness of her assumption that the fault lay with him. She had no right to reprimand him, he told her, when comrades were being tortured and killed at home in the struggle. What did those derelicts in the bar know about conditions in Russia? Had she heard the rubbish they were talking? Had she even been out of the house recently? For months he had been living like a hunted animal, shunted from one hiding place to another, harboured by brave workers who risked discovery and torture just so as he could get to Paris; to the great party abroad which would help build the revolution. And what did he find? A bunch of squabbling relics, Narodovolets most of them, who were twenty, no, thirty years behind the times. Well, he was fed up of running. He wanted to work, to continue the fight, not sink into the slough like the ones in the bar. “Words without deeds was death” and so on. It had been quite an outburst.

  After Jaques had ordered him to go to bed he lay awake for an hour, fretting in case he had overstepped the mark. But in the morning, he had been provided with new luggage, a change of travelling clothes and an address in London. He was to catch the noon boat train from the Gare du Nord. The person he was to contact in London was situated at 30, Holford Square, Pentonville: a Dr. Jacob Richter. He was to bear greetings from his cousin Jaques and to tell him that the wine was excellent. He was also to give her warmest greetings to Frau Richter. En fin, his wish had been granted. He was on his way.

  * * *

  The two railway journeys and the boat crossing had taken over ten hours. It was a wearisome journey, and he had deliberately disobeyed his instructions by spending some of the English money he had been given in Paris on the small luxury of two glasses of rum on the boat. Once in London, having been warned not to loiter in the echoing cavern of the railway terminus, a favourite pick-up point of the British secret police, he lost no time in hailing a horse drawn cab on the street. Carefully enunciating the address of his destination to the sullen cab driver, he climbed into the creaking hansom and had sat back, determined to enjoy the luxury of being driven through the city.

  Just as in Paris, he felt unsettled by the sheer size of the city’s buildings. Everything was so colossal, so alien, compared to home. Even Odessa was not as big as this city. It was as if he had been transported into a future, where the very stones proclaimed the monumental confidence of the ruling class. Steadily, the traffic became more congested until they broke out into the maelstrom of a square, one side of which was dominated by a tall stone column. At the base of the pillar he had glimpsed the outline of a pair of carved lions and had smirked at this imperial conceit, for huddled agains
t the old bronze flanks of the lions lay the unmistakeable figures of sleeping humanity. As the cab continued to traverse one side of the square, he saw more figures, clustered around the base of the column like the unburied fallen of some battlefield massacre. This scene of desolation disappeared as the carriage swung left behind tall buildings and began making its way up a narrow side street. Gradually he became aware of the sound of a great tumult, as if the invisible battle had been carried by its own momentum into another sector of the city. Excited cries and shouts, quite unintelligible to his ears, were growing in volume, mixed with the neighing of horses and the rumbling of carts. The cab slowed down to a walking pace and then, blocked by an obstruction ahead, stopped altogether. Peering through the cab’s small side window he saw that they had reached a night market, but a market of such dimension and dynamism that it beggared anything that even Petersburg could have boasted.

  Muttering, the driver climbed down from his seat and strode off into the crowd, leaving Trotsky to take in the scene around him. Stacked boxes of fruit and vegetables were arranged in serried ranks, starting at thigh height out on the narrow pavements to almost ceiling height inside the wholesalers’ warehouses. Everywhere, there was light: yellow light from the tall street lamps; white light from new electric lamps inside some of the premises; blue light from the naphtha flares and red light from the coals of the braziers of the street traders. It was as if night had been turned into day, there not being enough hours of natural daylight to turn a respectable profit. To the left and to the right of him he saw mountains of food, standing untended less than half a verst from the square full of hungry tramps. Under the glare of the lights he noted that many of the fruits and vegetables seemed to lose their distinctive colouring, so that the subtle differences in hue were lost between cabbages and lettuces, marrows and celery.

  The driver returned, bearing a covered tray which he hastily stowed on the top of the cab. He was just in the time, for the obstruction in front of them had been removed and angry voices could be heard from behind them urging him to be on his way. The cabbie cracked his whip and Trotsky watched as, in all its tonnage, the quantity of produce was slowly paraded for his inspection. Bulky sacks of peat brown potatoes sat next to trays of imported figs. Quinces and damsons piled high in their trays shared the pavement with smooth-skinned tomatoes and craggy artichokes. Intermittently, broad wooden drays appeared upon which men stood loading boxes of apples and pears while their massive draught horses resting between their shafts, munching steadily at their nosebags, spasmodically stamping their iron shod hooves against the cobblestones. And everywhere there were workers: small dark pugnacious looking men, emerging from the bright mouths of the warehouses, with boxes of walnuts and filberts balanced three high on their cloth-capped heads, or stooped under the weight of hessian sacks of turnips and beets. No sooner had one load been carried away than it was promptly loaded into by the merchants’ waiting carts and wagons.

  The cab continued its careful journey towards the periphery of the market. Down the side streets Trotsky glimpsed a greater structure, towering above the maze of street, like a glass and steel cathedral. This covered inner market seemed to form the centre of the area, for the trade became noticeably brisker around its precincts. The open doorways of the wholesalers’ warehouses were interspersed with the solid brick exteriors of bars, from which was coming a cacophony of music and laughter. Behind their steamed up windows, the carters sat at their ease, awash with beer and cheap meat pies, their rest time glimpsed in the fraction of a closing door.

  As it forged its way along the crowded thoroughfare, the cab was overtaken by jaunty youths, whistling to keep out the cold as they wheeled trolleys loaded with trays of grapes or black bullaces, and silent older men, pushing barrows with mounds of carrots, beans and sprouts. Trotsky watched as a shawled and raddled prostitute, standing inconveniently at a corner, was shoved aside by the bustling columns of men; some stripped to their waistcoats and mufflers despite the chill of the night air. In the gutters, urchins fought over spillages or munched hungrily on discarded stalks. Yelping pitifully, a dog with three legs was limping painfully beside the cab, using its bulk as a cover.

  With a click of his tongue, the cabbie urged his horse onwards. Gradually the light and smell of the market fell away, the noise fading last of all until it was only a buzzing in his ears. Overcome by it all, Trotsky closed the window, and sat back against the cracked leather upholstery, content to let the cabbie take him where he would. How small Odessa had seemed after Paris, and now London was bigger still!

  He shook his head violently and told himself that he must clear his mind and attend to the situation at hand, and not allow himself to be overawed by the sights of the city like a country bumpkin. He had messages to deliver and important people to meet. He wondered what sort of person this Dr. Richter was and whether he knew the writer Lenin. The author of The Development of Capitalism in Russia and What is to be done obviously boasted a first class mind; but how much of that was dedicated to scholarly theorising and how much to impassioned struggle? A sudden doubt overcame him: had he travelled nearly five thousand versts only to find yet another group of emigres cursed with the Russian sickness? Was this Lenin also prone to dogged despair punctuated by futile declarations?

  The cab was moving more quickly now through the silent streets, the sounds of the jangling harness and the horse’s hooves on the metalled surface of the roads echoing eerily against the walls of the houses that rose steeply on either side. At last it slowed to a stop and the driver’s double tap on the roof of the carriage signalled that the cab had reached its destination.

  Alighting, Trotsky found that they had arrived in a dimly lit square, devoid of any traffic. He took some coins from his pocket and offered them to the man. Reaching down the cab’s driver grasped his hand, held his open palm under the light of the coach lamp and shook his head. The money was insufficient to pay the fare. Withdrawing his hand Trotsky dug into his overcoat pocket and produced more coins, although he knew them to be of a lesser value. The driver shook his head again purposefully. Nodding in agreement, Trotsky dropped the coins back into his pocket and then held up both hands, palm outwards in the international signal for, “Wait!”

  This, he felt, was an awkward situation. The amount he had spent on the two glasses of rum on the boat crossing had left him short of money for the fare. Wasn’t that embezzlement? Moreover, his instructions about his arrival had been clear. He was to alight from the cab before reaching the address and allow the cab to leave the vicinity. Once he was sure that the coast was clear he would go to the door numbered 30 and give the agreed signal by knocking. This, he recognised, was not now possible; instead, he would have to rouse Dr. Richter and ask him for money to pay the cabdriver. It would mean a risk to security and, what was worse, great personal embarrassment. It risked becoming a repetition of the farcical scene he had played with Victor Adler; the reports of which had preceded his journey to Paris.

  He looked briefly around the square, but it appeared empty of loiterers and he could see no evidence of surveillance behind the shut faced curtained windows. Opening the door of the cab he reached in and picked up his luggage. Placing the suitcase deliberately on the pavement in full view of the driver he mimed his intentions. The driver solemnly nodded his approval. Turning quickly Trotsky hurried to the door of number 30 and gave the triple knock Jaques had taught him. He waited. There was no response. He tried again: one… two-three. Plek-hanov. From somewhere inside the house, on the first floor he heard a faint movement and seconds later saw an upstairs curtain twitch. A white moon of a face appeared briefly, then it was gone. Another minute passed and he debated whether he should knock again. He decided against it. To knock the first time was to follow orders; to knock the second time was to confirm his bona fides. To give the signal the third time would be to compromise his credibility as a man who could not be flustered.

  He had been told that the landlady, a Mrs Yeo, lived on the g
round floor of the premises. Looking first one way and then the other down the street, he leant forward and placed his ear against the panel of the door. New sounds were coming from within the house: soft footfalls descending the stairs; the hiss and pop of a gas lamp as light dawned in the hallway and then the sound of someone hurrying towards the door. Straightening up, he waited as the unseen person reached up and, with a grating sound of metal against metal, stealthily drew back the bolt. Cautiously the door was opened a few inches and a pudgy faced woman, her shabby nightgown caught protectively at the throat by her hand, stared out at him.

  “Yes?” she demanded, her voice thick with suspicion. “What you want?”

  Her crude use of English came as a surprise to him. Keeping his voice to a whisper he replied in Russian.

  “I am Pero. I have come to see Doctor Richter. Are you Frau Richter?”

  She looked at him and frowned.

  “Why do you want to see the doctor?”

  Confident that he had arrived at the correct address, he nodded.

  “Jaques sent me. I don’t have enough fare for the cab. I am very sorry, comrade. Can you help me?”

  Looking out into the square, she took in the waiting cab and the suitcase on the pavement beside it.

  “Wait here,” she ordered.

  Once she had paid off the cab the woman let him into the house, immediately closing the door and bolting it after him. Dowsing the gas, which exploded with another pop, she held a finger up against his lips. Then, taking him by the hand, she led him along the dark hallway past the bottom of the staircase to the back of the house. Opening a door, she pushed him through and followed after him.