“Let me testify for you, Kazan,” said Paul with fervor. “Let me testify that you were with me on the day of the explosion at Moscow.”
“If only it were that simple, Pavushka,” sighed Kazan. “If they are thwarted with the murder charge, they will convict me of my attempt on the tsar.”
“I am willing to take the chance.”
“Never, Paul! They would tear your story apart in minutes.”
“But to prevent your conviction as a murderer perhaps would lessen the sentence.”
“The answer is no. I will not have you publicly align yourself with me. It is too dangerous. A slip, a wrong look, a hesitant answer to one of the prosecution’s questions, and you could yourself be charged with complicity in either of the crimes.”
“But I would do it for you,” Paul pleaded.
“I won’t hear of it! It is bad enough that you have come to see me, and I would throttle Anickin’s neck for allowing it if I dared. Unfortunately, he is probably my only chance, slim though it may be.”
“Do you truly believe I am in danger?”
“For the moment we will hope you are viewed as nothing but an innocent younger brother. But should you take the stand, that would all change the moment the prosecutors began to grill you and present witnesses to testify that you are not who you claim to be and that you have been seen in company with other rebels and militants. No, Paul, you must leave here and forget me. Lose yourself, lay low, change your name, and keep miles away from any hint of trouble.”
He paused a moment, then added, “And do not show your face around here again. Forget all this foolishness about testifying. I will not have it!”
Paul looked away in dejected misery.
“You know, Pavushka,” said Kazan in a gentler tone, “you are very much like a little brother to me. I would not forgive myself if anything were to happen to you on my account.”
A wide grin formed on his lips. “Anyway, perhaps they will not get rid of old Kazan so easily,” he said optimistically, trying to boost Paul’s spirits. “Just you wait—it will be Vera Zasulich all over again! It will be the government on trial, not me. This could well be the turning point, the great moment when the people finally rally around our cause. I look forward to this trial, Pavushka!”
32
Paul watched the execution.
It was the last thing he wanted to do, but he would not desert his friend now. He had not attended the trial, in faithfulness to Kazan’s wish, yet he could not help feeling guilty for staying away. Perhaps some of that same guilt now impelled him to come out of hiding on this blackest of all days in his young life. He only hoped that his presence in the crowd of spectators would somehow give Kazan added strength in this awful, dark moment.
Paul wondered if he could even be seen among the hundred onlookers. If not, surely Kazan would know he was there, that he’d always remain loyal. Always!
Next to him stood Kazan’s defeated lawyer, Basil Anickin. He seldom missed these public executions and, in large part, his presence aroused little suspicion, for many of the doomed radicals had been his clients. Beneath such professional interest, however, something greater drove him to these public displays, every one of which added more fuel to his silently seething hatred.
Glancing at him out of the corner of his eye, Paul noted the taut, hard lines etched indelibly on his face. His eyes focused ahead, smoldering with a deep fire that rarely burst into flame, yet burned all the hotter inside. With unrelenting malice he stared at the scaffold, not letting his gaze waver to the right or the left. Whatever thoughts simmered in the depths of the lawyer’s mind, Paul could not guess. But he knew they had to revolve around the imperative for justice, for recompense . . . for revenge. Only the spilling of blood could assuage the look he saw in those eyes.
As Paul stood there, had he been asked point blank, he could not have truthfully denied such thoughts himself. For the first time in his life, he found himself thinking—really thinking—about killing. He supposed he had wanted to kill the schoolmaster in Pskov, but he hadn’t really given his actions any predetermined thought. It had all just happened. Now, however, he found himself considering what it would be like to kill, and reflecting on the idea with practical realism.
Unexpectedly, the thought did not cause him to shudder in revulsion. In fact, a certain morbid sense of pleasure surged through him. The thought of wrapping his hands around the throat of that brutal thug who had so humiliated both him and his father, who had so cruelly treated the peasants of the country around his home and was now carrying out the savagery of his lofty new position in St. Petersburg . . . just the thought of sending Cyril Vlasenko to another world gave him a thrill of satisfaction.
Had Paul been able to witness the changes taking place at that moment on his own face as he considered the demise of the Third Section chief, he might have been surprised, even shocked. For his youthful face suddenly bore an uncanny resemblance to that of Anickin, who stood at his side.
As Kazan mounted the scaffold steps, all Paul’s hatred was swallowed, for the moment at least, by the anguished grief of what was taking place before his eyes.
He remembered the enthusiastic young idealist when he had first made an appearance in the towns and villages around Katyk. He had been full of hope then, and so convinced that Herzen’s dream of rousing the fervor and support of the peasants would be fulfilled. The discouraging failure of his mission in the region disheartened and defeated many, who then turned away completely from the cause. But it had only strengthened Kazan’s zeal. Some might argue that it drove Kazan toward cynicism and violence, but Paul believed he had held on to his hope of a better society right up to the end. His final words to Paul proved it: “This could be the turning point, the great moment when the people finally rally around our cause.”
But there had been no great popular uprising. In many ways Paul did not understand this man, his best friend. He hadn’t understood that Kazan’s final words were spoken in futility, hadn’t grasped the foolhardy inanity of his final desperate act, hadn’t seen that the death sentence was insured the moment the cell door had clanked shut behind him.
At least Pugachov in the time of Catherine the Great had gone to his scaffold with the comforting knowledge that he had made some lasting mark, that his name would endure as one of the forerunners of freedom. Thousands had followed the Cossack who claimed to be Peter III, sweeping like wildfire through the Ural region and Volga Valley, capturing forts, killing whatever military officers, priests, and landowners happened to be in his path. Everywhere peasants flocked to join his makeshift army. Only merciless, sadistic governmental reprisals against his recruits depleted his forces enough to defeat him and bring his short-lived rebellion to naught. Yet he had died with the memory of scorched earth and aristocratic slaughter to comfort him, and with the knowledge that for one brief and glorious moment, he had struck fear into the tsaritsa and the hated nobles of her regime.
Poor Kazan had no such comfort. He was an unknown rabble-rouser who had come to the capital city thinking to make a triumphant mark in the birth of a new societal order. Instead, he had never reached the lofty pinnacle of his noble goals, had lost his perspective, and in a madcap and ill-fated rush for glory, had succeeded only in blowing a modest-sized hole in one of St. Petersburg’s streets and getting himself arrested . . . for good. Even his trial had been an ignominious affair, attracting little publicity, sparsely attended, and providing no forum for the dissemination of radical ideals as Kazan might have hoped.
And now just barely a hundred people gathered to see Kazan breathe his last. Probably three quarters of them didn’t even know his name.
Before he realized it, tears began to spill down Paul’s face. The loss of his friend was a bitter sorrow, compounded by the fact that his death seemed such an utter waste. And the sentence was unjust. Radical leaders guilty of far greater crimes still walked the streets freely.
Paul wanted to be strong. He tried to stop the tears, sque
ezing his hands into hard, clenched fists at his sides. Yet nothing could help. He might have begun to blubber like a child had it not been for the sound of Basil Anickin’s cold, tight voice in his ear.
“What are you crying for, you fool?” said the lawyer. “We do not need little babushkas—and our enemies do not merit your tears!”
Paul tried with difficulty to suck in two or three calming breaths of the chilly morning air.
“Forget your weeping,” Anickin went on. “It will do neither your friend nor our cause any good. Give them your hate, do you hear?” He grasped Paul’s chin in his slim fingers and jerked Paul’s head up straight. “Look!” he commanded. “Do not stare down at the ground like a coward. Dry away those tears so you can see your friend die. Watch! And let it burn like a fire into your soul!”
Paul obeyed. Under the compelling force of Basil’s grip he could hardly do otherwise.
Yet later, he realized that more than the lawyer’s fearsome presence and imperious words had compelled him to breathe deeply and courageously, to make himself experience the full impact of the awful moment. Deep within him he realized that he wanted this moment to be marked forever on his brain and heart. He did not ever want to forget. It would have been impossible to forget, in any event. But he wanted to remember what he felt at this moment. He wanted to keep the present fires within him alive.
He wanted to hate! He wanted to carry on within him the passion Kazan had taught him to feel against the oppressors. And like Basil Anickin, he wanted to keep alive forever the fuel to continually ignite that hatred!
He watched as Kazan refused the priest’s offer of unction.
Had Paul’s heart not been so heavy, he might have smiled, for he thought he detected one last twinkle in Kazan’s eyes in that final act of defiance.
Then the executioner slipped the noose around the thin neck, cinching it tight against the protruding Adam’s apple.
With eyes transfixed upon the awful proceeding, Paul beheld the unfolding drama of death in silence. He fixed his eyes upon his friend’s. And although he knew that it was impossible for Kazan to see him, Paul felt that with the last remaining spark of life he possessed, Kazan was focusing down upon the youth he had affectionately called Pavushka.
Courageously Paul did not turn away. With great force of will, he managed to hold his gaze steady as the trap door sprung open. He winced with a shudder as the rope, with an awful jerk, snapped the bones in Kazan’s neck. As he dangled lifelessly at the rope’s end, the last gasp of air squeezed out of Kazan’s lungs, the hideous aspiration of death.
Paul watched . . . and he would never forget.
33
For several hours after the hanging, Paul walked the streets of St. Petersburg, having lost all sense of time.
Sometime after noon he wandered across Isaac’s Bridge to Vassily Island. His progress was aimless, but all along he knew he would end up at Kazan’s flat on Maly Prospect. The porter let him in without question, for he was a frequent visitor. He had, in fact, lived in the place until after the Voronezh meeting. As Kazan’s activities intensified, however, Kazan had considered it unwise for them to be too closely associated. Paul located a flat with six or seven impoverished students two blocks away, where he had lived ever since.
Paul glanced sadly around the shabby room. It was a pitiful representation of a man’s life. Whatever material wealth or possessions Kazan might have had from his father, who was by no means a wealthy man in the first place, he had given up when he answered Herzen’s call to “go to the people.” His remaining years, few though they were, he spent in poverty.
“I’m poor as a dirt-scratching peasant!” he would laugh. “And I am proud of it!”
But now it seemed only a miserable shame. Paul did not count Kazan’s worth by his material possessions. Yet in view of the purposeless death he had just died, the condition of his living quarters made his life seem all the more futile.
The police had ransacked the place after Kazan’s arrest. Paul bent over and picked up a chair that had been left lying on its side on the floor. One by one he set the rest of the furnishings in place. He gathered up some broken pieces of crockery and cookware and a few books scattered on the floor. Paul stacked the books neatly on a table—he supposed he would take them himself, for it seemed a shame to leave them for the illiterate porter who would no doubt soon be clearing out the place for a new tenant. They would be for Paul a small remembrance of his friend, something untarnished by blood and hate. God only knew how he needed something, something tangible, at this moment of uncertainty and despair.
Yet Kazan’s books could not displace the hatred simmering within him. The ghastly memory of Kazan’s death had been imprinted upon his brain and heart forever.
The events of that black day in his life had not yet directed Paul toward any certain course. But as he wandered around the dingy room, certain perspectives gradually began to come into focus. Each pitiful possession, each worn book, each broken chair began to speak silently to him, telling him what he must do. There was only one path for him to take now. In the midst of all this plundered emptiness, Paul must find a way to give meaning to his friend’s life. He must elevate Kazan’s memory out of this wretched poverty, to give him the legacy of honor he deserved.
In that moment, Paul knew that he must carry on the mission for which Kazan had been martyred.
Naive or idealistic notions about what that meant had disappeared.
Paul still believed fervently, now more than ever, that the mission was a just and noble one. But for the first time he saw that Kazan’s chosen path—the path of violence and bloodshed—was the only one, the right one. A noble goal must be obtained by any means possible. No crime could be too evil, no method too distasteful.
He recalled something from one of Kazan’s pamphlets, a quote from the writing of Sergei Nechaev. Paul had balked at the very idea when he first read it. But now he understood. Now he found himself on the same side of the fence with a man he had once looked upon as a depraved murderer.
Morality, Nechaev had written, is everything which contributes to the triumph of the revolution. Immoral and criminal is everything that stands in the way.
Perhaps he would not go as far as Nechaev had gone. But Paul was determined to go further than he had ever gone before. He was at last ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for the cause. He was prepared to give his very soul to the cause of liberation, even to the point of death, if his destiny followed that of Kazan.
He left the apartment with a great sense of purpose. Now he could hold his head high among any of Kazan’s colleagues, even the leaders Zhelyabov, Perovskaya, and Anickin. He felt the zeal and single-minded determination that drove them, that had driven Kazan. At last, though it had taken his mentor’s death to achieve it, he was one of them!
It was natural, then, that Paul’s footsteps now turned toward these new comrades.
34
It was not easy to locate Andrei Zhelyabov. He kept his footsteps well concealed, and did not remain many weeks in the same place.
Paul, however, knew enough of the right people, and was sufficiently recognized as the protege of the now-ennobled Kazan, that with an afternoon’s searching and questioning and walking about from contact to contact, he was able to find his way to the inner sanctum of rebellion.
The tall, lean, handsome revolutionary greeted him with a cool formality. He kept his true feelings under close guard deep within himself, and did not easily let his tone or facial gestures reflect what he might be thinking on another level. Paul found the leader of The People’s Will to be of a kind and gentle disposition.
“It is a terrible shame about Kazan,” said Zhelyabov with sincerity as he motioned Paul to a chair. “He will be sorely missed among us.” The leader did not reflect on the fact that Kazan had been executed for his and Sophia’s attempt on the tsar’s train, nor that his comrade’s death would take the heat off his own head. Kazan’s death, in fact, would probably make thi
ngs easier for him for quite some time.
The flat, on the fifth line on Vassily Island, was in a neighborhood populated largely by low-ranking government employees. It reflected that large St. Petersburg class with its threadbare, semi-poverty existence. It was several steps up in quality from Kazan’s lodgings, but it was still poorer than many carriage houses attached to mansions throughout the city. Zhelyabov explained that the occupant was a friend who had permitted him to stay there temporarily.
“I must necessarily move about constantly,” he said. “Freedom of movement is becoming increasingly difficult. The number of people who are willing to keep me are fewer and fewer. The particular friend here is nervous about my presence, and I am in the process of relocating once more. It is no small feat that you found me at all.”
“Then I am even more grateful that I did,” said Paul, feeling awed in the presence of this great leader. “And I appreciate that you consented to see me.”
“I remember seeing you often with Kazan. I know he put great store in his friendship with you. Am I correct in assuming that his untimely death has brought you to me?”
“Kazan was a brother to me,” replied Paul. “He gave me so much, cared for me when I was alone and lost in this big city, fed me from his meager supply, and opened his home to me. He helped me to be strong when I was a frightened boy in prison. Sometimes I do not know what I will do without him.”
“You will do well, I am sure.”
“I suppose I have no choice but to go on.”
“Unfortunately, I am in no position to offer you succor.”
“That is not why I have come.”
“I thought not. I see some deeper purpose in your eyes. I hope I can help you.”
“It is my hope that I can help you,” said Paul.
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