by Jasper Kent
‘Maybe – maybe not. I’m on my own now. All the others are dead, or gone over to her, or just gone. But winter’s coming, so the nights will be longer. Perhaps there’s still something I can do for Russia.’
He stood up and offered me his hand. I let him pull me to my feet.
‘What are you going to do afterwards?’ he asked. ‘Once Iuda’s blood has left you.’
‘If I can’t think of anything by then,’ I replied, ‘then I’ll die.’
‘How? You said you can’t kill yourself.’
I looked him straight in the eye. ‘I’ll find someone I trust to do it for me.’
It took him a moment to understand, and then he walked away without any hint that he would accept the undertaking. After a few paces he stopped and faced me.
‘What about Ascalon?’ he asked.
‘What about it?’
‘Do you think it’s safe with you – with him?’
‘It’ll have to be.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better with me?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I replied, not even pausing to consider it.
‘I could easily take it from you.’
‘Dmitry,’ I asked, ‘would you really want to? You went halfway around the world to get away from him. Do you really think a memento like that is going to do you any good?’
He stood and looked down at me, his eyes fixed on the pocket in which I’d put the relic. If he wanted it I would not be able to resist him. I could not imagine what thoughts – what memories – were going through his head. At last he took a deep breath and turned away. I watched him walk into the distance, then set off myself.
It was vile of me to go home, but there was nothing else to be done. And it would be just as vile of me to stay away. It was Wednesday evening when I had last seen Nadya, and now it was the early hours of Saturday. She had no idea what had happened to me, and in the meantime our nation’s government had fallen once again. I had to let her know that I was alive, though I was not sure I could stomach telling her the truth of what had befallen me. I could have done that much by letter, or even asked Dmitry to convey a message for me. To go and see her face to face was far more for my benefit than hers. And beyond seeing her, I had more material needs. I required food, shelter, sleep – and above all my pills.
I didn’t take the quickest route home, not because I had any desire to delay the moment, but out of the need to avoid the crowds I’d seen in Palace Square. I turned down Nevsky Prospekt and then went along the Yekaterininsky Canal. I passed the Church on Spilled Blood on the other side of the waterway, but I could see soldiers – regular soldiers, not Red Guards – on duty at each of the entrances. They must have discovered the corpses inside. If the police were in any functioning state they would be investigating. They’d have found the bodies at the bathhouse too by now, and probably those of the professor and his wife. What clues had I left at each of those sites, I wondered. Had I been seen – recognized even? If they had the slightest clue it was me, they could easily use my fingerprints to make a watertight case.
Could that be my salvation? Could it give me the weeks or months that I needed? A trial would take that long; certainly if I could find lawyers to spin it out. But even then I would not face the noose. After the revolution the death penalty had been abolished. I would rot in some gaol, but that would be enough. There would be nothing Iuda could do to stop it, unless he could convince them that we were insane. That wouldn’t be so very far from the truth.
But there was still some hope that there might be a way to separate us that did not involve my death or incarceration. I’d failed to learn very much from Susanna, but there remained plenty she might know. She’d discovered a lot over the years. Like Iuda I had no idea who this Dutchman was, or the others she’d mentioned. Perhaps they were connected with those I’d witnessed finally putting an end to Zmyeevich’s existence. His evil must have touched the lives of many across Europe and I’d be arrogant to think that my family’s story was the only one in which he featured. But the Dutchman was dead according to Susanna, and so could be of no help. But the very fact that men like him existed gave me hope that the knowledge I required was out there.
At last I arrived at my front door. I’d had half a mind to sneak in, take what I needed and leave a note for Nadya, but I realized long before I got there that I had no keys and that the only way I would be able to get in would be to rouse her. If Syeva had still been alive a quiet tap on the door would have brought a quick response, but now I pounded loud enough to wake her, even at the top of the house. I realized as I began that I was doing her a disservice to suppose that she would be asleep.
The door was opened in seconds. She made no show of caution; she did not peek out through a crack to see who it was. She threw it wide open and stood for a moment, staring at me. She lifted her hands to her face and I embraced her, squeezing her arms against her chest, burying my face in her sweetly scented hair. Somewhere near by I could hear Polkan barking, welcoming me home. We held the pose for a few moments, then I felt her pushing at me, trying to break away. I took a step back, wondering what I had done wrong, but discovered that she merely wanted to free her arms. She put them around me, pulling me towards her, this time with her face upturned so that we could kiss.
I had never known a more joyous moment, and I wondered whether I ever should again. When in my youth I had killed Iuda – supposed I had killed him – I had felt it to be the culmination of my life’s work, but there was no real happiness in it. This was quite different. This was a sensation of utter relief, of being found having been lost, of drinking a glass of cool water when dying of thirst. I was in the only place I should ever want to be.
Eventually, but still too soon, we had to separate. I closed the door behind me, then squatted down to stroke Polkan. He had stopped barking by now, but approached me tentatively. He didn’t object to my fingers running through his fur, but neither did he roll on to his back to be tickled. He eyed me warily. He was a perceptive creature.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Nadya tried to inject her voice with righteous anger, but it cracked as she spoke and the breath she drew afterwards sounded like a sob. She looked deathly. Her skin was pale and drawn in at her cheeks. I knew that I should tell her everything, and quickly – Iuda might return at any moment. But I was too much of a coward. I would tell her, I was certain of it, but not just now. For her a delay would make no difference. Whenever she learned the truth, she would be horrified – devastated. But for me the stay of execution would mean some little comfort, some pretence of normality – a chance to say goodbye to that very normality, for I knew it would soon be gone for ever. And yet every moment that I did not speak would make it harder in the end. Perhaps I’d already hesitated for too long in those few seconds I had stood in her embrace. But still I could not bring myself to tell her.
‘Please,’ I said, ‘not now. Just let me sleep. Just let me be with you. I’ll tell you everything in the morning.’
She gazed at me for a moment, then nodded and held out her hand. We went up the stairs together, with Polkan limping behind. Once in our room, my first action was to go to the drawer beside the bed. There were my pills, not in their silver box – that was lost – but in the paper wrapper in which the pharmacist provided them. I slipped one under my tongue. I probably didn’t need it now, not like I had done outside the cathedral, but it calmed me simply to know I had taken it. I quickly changed into my night clothes and climbed into bed.
Nadya got in beside me. She kissed me without a word and then turned out the light. We lay in silence for a few minutes and then I heard her speak.
‘Whatever it is, Misha, is it over?’
I couldn’t lie to her. ‘No,’ I replied.
She said no more. Within minutes I was asleep.
When I awoke I was alone. It was light outside. From along the corridor I could hear the sound of Nadya gently singing to herself: Tonkaya Ryabina. I listened to her, enjoying the moment, knowing
it wouldn’t last.
Why do you stand swaying, slender rowan tree, your head bent over your roots?
And across the way, over the broad river, just as alone, stands a tall oak tree.
How could I, the rowan tree, go to the oak? Then I wouldn’t stand bowing and swaying.
With my slender branches I’d press against him, and with his leaves, whisper day and night.
But it’s impossible for a rowan tree to move to the oak. Such is its fate: forever alone, swaying.
She came to an end. I was glad that it was I who had awoken to hear it, and not Iuda. But I realized I could not be sure of that. Both of us could perceive; it was merely action that was limited to one or other of us. I had not moved since I woke – either of us could be in charge, perhaps whoever chose first to grab the reins.
I lifted my hand and touched my face. My arm moved in obedience to my will. I was still me, for the time being. I should also have known from the tears that I felt on my face, a result of hearing Nadya’s sweet voice. But perhaps Iuda might have shed them. I had begun to learn something of how sentimental he could be.
I swung my legs out of the bed and stood up, then went on to the landing. Polkan was lying down at the top of the stairs. He raised his head, but did not come to me. Nadya had begun to sing again down below. I went in the direction of the sound. As soon as I began to move, Polkan was on his feet and making his way down the stairs in the sideways fashion he’d developed to avoid using his injured leg. He went straight to the bathroom on the second floor. I followed him and there I found Nadya. The dog lay down again, watching us intently.
‘You slept well,’ she said. It was mundane, considering the circumstances.
‘I didn’t wake at all?’ There was always the possibility that Iuda had taken the opportunity to act while I was asleep.
‘Not that I noticed. I’ve drawn you a bath.’
The tub of hot water looked inviting. I undid my buttons and began to undress, but my limbs were stiff and I let out a groan.
‘Let me help you,’ she said.
She stood behind me and held my nightshirt as I pulled my arms out of it. The ragged bandage that Susanna had applied was still there. Nadya reached out to it.
‘May I?’ she asked.
I nodded. She untied the knot in the linen. A straight, neat scab covered the line of the wound.
‘There’s a cut on your throat too,’ she said. ‘Neither of them looks like something a vampire would do.’
‘Not exactly,’ I replied.
‘Careful you don’t open that up when you’re washing. I’ll dress it properly afterwards. And then you can tell me all about it; especially what happened to your sideboards.’
She helped me out of my trousers and then went away. I heard Polkan’s claws tapping unevenly against the wooden floor as he trotted alongside her. I climbed into the bath and lay still, my right arm hanging over the side so as not to soak the wound. I tried to think what I was going to tell her – how I was going to tell her. Any other problem would have been easy. I’d just speak the truth, and we’d swear to each other that we’d manage somehow, that even if the whole world was against us the two of us together would struggle through.
But it wasn’t going to be two of us – there were three of us. Iuda would always be with me; I could see no way out of that. Whether I chose to live or die – if I had the choice – it would not be with Nadya by my side. How could it? What man could condemn the woman he loved to spend half her life with a creature such as Iuda? Or a tenth of it? Or a thousandth?
I washed myself and then shaved, still sitting in the bath. In the mirror I saw the little cut that Susanna had caused to my throat. At the time I had been praying that she would succeed and kill us both. Now I knew how awful the consequences of that might have been. But death was still my best hope – it just had to be delayed for a little while.
I picked up the towel that Nadya had left for me and went back up to the bedroom. I’d almost finished drying when she came in. She had two glasses of tea on a tray. She put them on the table. She seemed dreadfully sad, but doing everything she could to hide it. I went over to kiss her. Our lips touched lightly at first, but then we began to kiss more deeply, or at least I did. She hesitated for a moment and then yielded. Our tongues met. I ran my hand down her back and began to caress her buttock through her thin housecoat. She pushed me away and I looked to see her smiling, her eyebrow raised.
She stepped back and went to the door, where Polkan was lying quietly on the landing. She closed it. ‘We don’t want to be disturbed,’ she said.
She came back and stood close to me again. I bent forwards to kiss her and felt her cool hands against me, her fingers running through the hairs on my chest and then downwards, across my belly and to my thighs. I undid the little bow at the collar of her coat, and then moved down to each button, one by one. I knew full well that I should stop and for just the same reason that Iuda had declined when Susanna had offered him the delights of her body. The other of us would always be there, and however blissful the act of love might be for both me and Nadya, it would become a monstrous perversion if it was an experience shared by any other. If shared by Iuda it would be the ultimate obscenity.
I raised my hands to push her away from me and tried to formulate the words of an explanation, knowing that only the truth would suffice. But my hands continued their task of undressing her.
It was too late – I wasn’t sure by how long. I was no longer in control of my actions. If I had been, I would have stopped earlier. I had let my body control me, as was natural at a moment like this, and he had seized the vacancy created.
And now all I could be was a witness – a witness not merely by sight and hearing, but by every sensation – as the man I most despised in the whole world, Iuda, raped the woman I loved.
He wasn’t cruel or brutal in any way. He contemplated it, and sometimes imagined it, but he came to the conclusion that he could do far more harm by being a considerate lover. He made sure that his every thought was clear to me, as if he was talking me through his plans. He even let me know that the very openness was part of the plan itself. He was a chess player, not a card player; there were no secrets to be revealed, no cards held close to his chest – everything that he did was in the open, accessible to any who had the wisdom to understand it. It was just the same, he informed me, as what he had done to Lyosha over Dominique. I didn’t understand what he meant by it and he let the concept pass from his mind. He was saving it for later.
He had no desire to harm Nadya or cause her pain, not as a primary goal anyway. I was the chosen object of his disdain. It wasn’t even an act of vengeance as such; I had simply raised my head above the parapet by killing him back in 1881. I had challenged him to a game – just as my grandfather had in 1812 – and he had accepted, and now neither of us could back out until the end. In other circumstances he might have delighted in making Nadya suffer, but that would make things too easy for me, made the path I chose too obvious. The simple question Iuda had posed for me was, what could I tell her?
I lay on my back thinking about it, her head resting on my chest, her eyes closed, a smile on her lips. What could I tell her? If I revealed the truth – that Iuda shared my mind – then the inevitable question would follow: who was that she’d made love to? If I said it was Iuda then she would feel tricked, abused, violated. She would feel no better for the fact that it was impossible for her to have known; any more than if he had physically forced himself upon her, she would have found refuge in the knowledge that she did not have the strength to resist him. In both circumstances there was a rational argument that she should feel no guilt, but this could never be a matter of rationality. If it had been Iuda then she had been raped, and that was the end of it.
But if I told her it was me, how much better was that? It would mean that I had made love to her in full knowledge that Iuda would draw from it every scintilla of physical pleasure that I did. No one sane would want to share
such intimate moments with a third person even watching, so how much worse would this be? It would prove my selfishness, that my carnal desires were so overpowering that I had to exploit Nadya in order to satisfy them, and to hell with the fact that it would not only be me who got the pleasure of it.
And in truth I did not even know which of us it had been, not entirely. That was the genius of how Iuda had chosen to behave. If he had done something vile to her then it would have been easy; I would have been able to point at it and say, ‘That was not me. That could never be me.’ But there was no such moment. Everything he did I would have gladly done myself, and had done in the past. There were times when I felt that it was I who was kissing her, tasting her, caressing her; I who was in control. Was it simply because he was doing what I would have done, or was it that from time to time it was I who made the decisions, who told my body what it should do to hers? The reality was that it was not I or he who had taken Nadya that morning, but we.
And so the only option I had was to tell her nothing. Iuda had worked that out very early on. He knew that I would do anything to save her from the burden of not knowing which of us it was – of never being able to know for sure at any moment when we were together. And that meant I could not relieve my own burden by sharing with her that fact of my sorry state of being. I could never see her again, I knew that, not until I could find a way of freeing myself of Iuda. My task now, my additional task, was to invent a reason for my departure that would be convincing. But that would have to wait.
I held her tightly in my arms, then rolled across the bed so that she was lying on her back. I held her for a little longer, then stood up. I don’t think she was asleep, but she was too contented to move. I dressed quickly, finding a new coat from my wardrobe. I transferred my possessions from the other one – I couldn’t stand to wear it, knowing where it came from. There was the razor, Iuda’s homemade knife and Ascalon. I wanted nothing to do with any of them, but I would not leave them here, not for Nadya to find. I also took my nitroglycerin pills. I allowed myself one last look at Nadya, then opened the door.