by Jasper Kent
I saw her on a few other occasions and noted how, from behind, it was very difficult to tell her and Margarita apart. Then my mind turned to Shakespeare and I realized how the comedy of Much Ado about Nothing could so easily be transformed into the tragedy of Othello.
Even so, it took weeks before I had the chance to spring my trap. There were so many things that could have gone wrong, but I knew Lyosha well enough to understand how jealousy would consume him. It was easy to bribe Pyetr Pyetrovich – the brothel-keeper – to tell Lyosha that Dominique was not at home, and to inform me when he had seen Lyosha creep into the house opposite, where, as I had predicted, he would find himself a good viewpoint to peer across the street and into Dominique’s room. Now the show could begin. It didn’t matter which of the girls – Dominique or Margarita – participated, as long as he only saw her from behind. But that was easy enough to orchestrate. In the end I was happy to discover how willing each of them was, each for her own reasons. Had the evening been for my benefit I might have taken them both. But Lyosha could only be allowed to see one, and then not clearly.
By the time he arrived at his hiding place, both of us were in Dominique’s room. The girl was naked, I stripped to the waist. We were standing close to the door, away from the window. I turned up the lamp so that he would be sure to see us, then kissed her lips before stepping back to take in the shapely naked curves of her enchanting body. Her long dark hair hung over her left shoulder, concealing one of her breasts. I let my eyes linger over her body, then returned my gaze to her beautiful face. I’d had to make a choice between Margarita and Dominique and in the end I had chosen.
It was …
Dominique.
Suddenly Iuda’s words made sense to me: his last words and his first words. The last words that I had perceived rather than heard, back in 1881, as he drank my blood in the tunnels beneath Malaya Sadovaya while the light of the Yablochkov Candle burned him to nothing. It was a desperate message that he had not quite been able to complete.
‘Tell Lyosha. It was …’
And then the first word he had spoken as he awoke in my body in the Church on Spilled Blood. I’d almost forgotten, but he was merely finishing the sentence he had begun thirty-six years before.
‘Tell Lyosha. It was Dominique.’
And even if he had completed it, I wouldn’t have believed him. He couldn’t be trusted on the matter, he’d made sure of that. The events he’d recalled at the Berezina proved it. He could have screamed ‘Margarita’ nine hundred and ninety-nine times and I would still not have believed him, for fear that on the thousandth he would mutter ‘Dominique’.
But now I had stronger evidence – the evidence of Iuda’s own memories, and he could not lie about those. Nor had he finished with his recollections.
He reached out and took Domnikiia’s hands in his own. She was as beautiful as I had imagined her to be. Mama had always told me that she resembled the empress Marie-Louise. I’d looked at pictures, just so that I might know her better, and now that I saw her the resemblance was obvious, though Domnikiia was far more beautiful. Her face was a delight, her body perfection. She could barely have been nineteen at the time.
I put my hands to her waist and lifted her off the floor, feeling a twinge from my wounded arm, but she wasn’t heavy. I pulled her towards me and she realized what I was trying to do. She put her arms round my neck to take some of her weight and wrapped her slender legs around me. I felt her breasts pressing against me and her silken hair between us caressing my skin. I felt the urge to run, tried to think of other things, but it was Iuda who controlled this memory, not I.
I carried her over towards the window. It was a cold night, but the curtains were open. I made sure that her back was all that could be seen, and tried to hide my face too as we kissed, knowing that a sudden revelation would be more shocking. I put my hands underneath her buttocks to take a little of her weight, but also to caress her. I pushed her up against the window and she flinched a little at the cold touch of the glass. I stepped away again, running my fingers along her spine. Then our lips separated.
‘Stand up,’ I whispered.
She unwrapped her legs and dropped to the floor, her hands still clasped around my neck, her eyes looking up into mine. I took a step back, knowing now that my face could be seen. I didn’t hesitate. I gazed down at the curve of her neck and parted my lips. Her hair still hung over her shoulder, so I brushed it behind her. Then I descended upon her throat. I was long practised in imitating the actions of a vampire, and it was simple to make something that she perceived as merely a kiss seem to an observer – to Lyosha – to be the unmistakable bite of the voordalak. I pinched her flesh a little between my teeth, and ran my tongue against it, but I made sure I didn’t break the skin. I looked out through the window into the night, knowing that Lyosha could see me, making sure he was aware that this was for his benefit – that he had caused this.
I did not remain very long like that, bent over her. I raised my head and she sat back on the windowsill, her arms stretched out on either side of her, her fingers curled around the lip of the wood. I reached into my pocket and took out my knife – my double-bladed knife. I closed my eyes and drew its twin points horizontally across my chest. The pain was minimal, but enough to excite me further. I felt the blood running down over my stomach.
‘Go on,’ I whispered. ‘You promised.’
She looked unsure, but slid down from the windowsill and walked towards me. She bent her knees slightly to be at the right level. She placed one hand against my chest and another on my shoulder and pulled herself towards me. Still she kept her lips a few inches away from me. I put my hand on the back of her head and pulled her close. I felt her lips touch me, but they did not part. She had no taste for my blood, but it did not matter. I threw my head back and closed my eyes, mimicking ecstasy, then stared directly at where I knew Lyosha to be.
Domnikiia pulled away. I didn’t resist. Our scene was finished. She took my hand and led me away from the window. I could have ended it then – what was the point now that we were unseen? But I had paid for more, and back then I was still human. She sat down at the foot of the bed and then began to crawl back up to the head. She lay there, one hand behind her head, one knee bent, the other straight.
I quickly removed my breeches and stood before her, now completely naked. I climbed on to the bed and crawled towards her. Soon I was above her, our faces close to one another. I kissed her and ran my hand across her body; down her side, across her belly and finally between her legs. She shivered as I touched her and a thrill ran through my body. We lay like that for several minutes until finally I moved my hand away and crawled on top of her.
She made no sound as I entered her. I tried to fight against the recollection, to focus on sight or sound, or on any sensation other than touch, but Iuda’s memory was complete and detailed, as if he remembered every stroke of his body, every squeeze of her thighs, every scratch of her fingernails. And sight and sound were just as bad; he never took his eyes from her face, as if even then he had known how this memory might one day serve him, that one day he could use it to destroy Domnikiia’s own grandson. I heard her moans and whether they were real or pretended made no difference to me. Finally I felt Iuda’s ultimate pleasure, both physically, and in the knowledge that he was taking what belonged to Lyosha – and in the knowledge that he was showing it to me.
And at that moment, as had probably been the case back in 1812, he lost interest. His memory faded in an instant. I sat up. Iuda was gone from my mind, though I could sense that his presence still lurked. But for now I was once again in charge of my body and the memories that ran through my head were my own.
But the memory that came back to me was the most recent one. It may have been second-hand, but it had become part of my past too. However I tried to expel such thoughts, all I could perceive was my grandmother’s eyes looking up into mine, the taste of her skin, and the sensation of my body inside hers.
; I stood up and staggered across the cell, then collapsed on to my knees. Tightness gripped my every muscle and my body began to convulse. For a moment I thought it was the same sensation I had just experienced in Iuda’s mind, but this was different – a reaction to it. I vomited into the corner of the cell. There wasn’t much, only the blini I’d had for lunch, but I continued to retch, with nothing more to bring up.
It wasn’t simply the physical act that revolted me, nor the way that Iuda had managed to take the same trick he’d performed with Nadya and repeat it, a thousand times worse. The ultimate horror was the realization of the truth about Domnikiia. However loyal she might have been to him in later years, she had deceived Aleksei. She had played Iuda’s game, and demonstrated what a prostak Aleksei was. At the moment of his darkest need, she had sided with his enemy. Everything that my grandfather had ever believed about her – everything my mother and I had ever believed – was destroyed.
MARCH
CHAPTER XX
IT MUST HAVE been an enormous explosion. From the direction the sound came it was on the other side of the Neva, but it was still deafening, and enough to make the walls of the cell shake. Seconds later came another blast, and then a third and a fourth. Beforehand we’d heard the sound of biplanes, and could still hear them, between the explosions. It was difficult to make out what direction they were going, but the sound of the bombs moved progressively eastwards, and became quieter, muffled by the fortress itself.
The Germans had tried raiding Petrograd from the air before – from aeroplanes and Zeppelins – but they had never been able to get close enough. We’d heard from the guards that day by day the Front was approaching the city. Now it seemed they were near enough to strike. The guards saw it as typical of German treachery to advance even as Trotsky negotiated a peace, but to us it seemed like good politics – forcing the best terms out of the enemy. Neither of us was happy at how often we found ourselves in agreement over such matters.
I got up off the bed and went to stand beneath the small window, listening to the biplanes’ engines. The sound began to get louder again and it became obvious that the aircraft were coming about. They might be simply returning to their airfield, but they could just as well be taking the opportunity to make a second pass. Petrograd had little hope of defending itself against a strike from the air. There was no sound of gunfire. The city had had artillery to protect it against this sort of attack since the early days of the war, but it had proved ineffective even on those rare occasions it was called upon. Major-General Boorman had been responsible for it, but he wasn’t given enough resources to do the job properly. I’d worked alongside him in the early months; it made sense, given my expertise.
It was mid-February now, as far as we could reckon. I’d begun by scratching figures on the wall to mark the passing days, but Iuda deemed it a waste of time. He was, he felt, quite capable of remembering what day it was. What he wasn’t capable of, despite his confidence when we arrived, was escape. He hadn’t even managed to formulate a plan. He thought about it almost constantly, but without coming to any conclusion. Sometimes I managed to fall asleep while he would remain alert, considering the possibilities, but when I awoke I would discover that nothing had changed and that he had devised no ingenious mechanism whereby we might gain our liberty.
I was content with it. If we were to rot here, then that was a better outcome than I had at times feared. I knew that I could never be with Nadya again, but her letters were some consolation. I was allowed to write to her within a few days of my incarceration and explain my predicament. I begged her not to visit me and she complied. She wrote a letter to me every day, though I did not receive them every day. I would get them in batches, once or twice a week. They were opened, of course, but Nadya and I had both lived long enough under the tsar to know that letters to and from prisoners would be read, and there was no reason to suppose things would be any different under Lenin.
Try as I might, I could find no way of conveying to her the real fate that had befallen me – worse than imprisonment; my conjoining with Iuda. It would have been a challenge to formulate that news in a way that would have made it past the censors, but I never even got as far as that hurdle. I simply did not have the guts to tell her.
And yet constantly I feared that someone else might tell her instead, that Iuda’s consciousness might grasp my hand as it moved across the page and direct it to write vile lies to my beloved – or worse to write the truth. But my fear went unrealized. Iuda never tried to influence what I wrote. It wasn’t out of kindness, he made that perfectly clear. He was just keeping his powder dry, knowing that one day a few false words from him could utterly destroy her – and me. There was another factor, though; we didn’t even know what his handwriting would be like. Was it bound to the body or to the mind? He was itching to find out, not least from the point of view of scientific curiosity, but he never did, aware that such information would either put my mind at ease or make me more wary of him.
The worst of it was, I could not even picture Nadya now in her daily routine. I could not imagine where she was and what she was doing as I lay inactive upon the bed. The problem lay not in the strange, shared world of my mind. It was simply down to the fact that I had no idea where she lived. Susanna knew our old address, and that was dangerous. I couldn’t imagine what kind of vengeance she might seek, or even if she would bother, but she knew of our house on Panteleimonovskaya Street – she had lived there – and so Nadya was in danger. I’d told her to find somewhere else to live and then, realizing that it was better to keep everything from Iuda that I possibly could, I’d instructed her not to tell me her new address. I sent my letters to our former neighbour, Vera Glebovna, to forward to Nadya. So far she had not failed in her duty.
Of late I’d had some slight consolation. Nadya had told me in one of her letters how on every Friday evening she came and stood on the Palace Bridge, a little after sunset, and looked out towards the Trubetskoy Bastion, where she knew my cell to be. Today was Saturday – if Iuda’s reckoning was right – and so as usual the previous evening I had sat and faced south and even though all that had confronted me was a stone wall I had been able to see Nadya there, with Polkan sitting obediently beside her.
And there had been other ways to occupy my mind. Iuda delighted in remembering events from his long, vile life – events that would be of particular interest to me. He did not always dwell on his victories, but sometimes instead revealed memories that were pleasant to me. It was a delicate balance that he struck. He worked out that I could ignore him if I really tried, so he had to tempt me in. And I was willingly tempted. Anything was worth it to see, almost as if real, my mother and my grandfather. I had no further interest in Domnikiia. He had more memories of Mama, and few that were unpleasant to me. They had worked alongside each other for the Third Section in Moscow for over a year, for most of which Mama had harboured no suspicions of him, and therefore he had found no reason to harm her. He didn’t shy from reminding me that during that time she had been working in a brothel, but I knew it already. Neither did he ever fail to note, for my benefit, that it was the same building – the same brothel – in which he and Domnikiia had tricked Aleksei another forty years before. In his recollections, every time he passed by, he looked up at that window.
Of Aleksei he had fewer memories. For such enemies it was surprising how little time they had spent together – how rarely their paths had crossed. They had only met on a few occasions in Moscow, and the strange thing was that my interest lay almost as much in how the city had changed as it did in seeing my grandfather. Iuda particularly liked to recall an occasion when he tricked Aleksei into meeting him at a lonely, snow-covered crossroads somewhere south of the city, where the dead body of a soldier hung from a gibbet. I was as surprised as Aleksei must have been when the body sprang to life and grabbed him, revealing itself to be one of the oprichniki. But even on that occasion Aleksei had triumphed – if escape can be counted as victory. Iuda liked to rep
lay the time when he had been making love to Aleksei’s wife, Dmitry’s mother, Marfa, and Aleksei had walked in on them, but he enjoyed it less than the memories of his time with Domnikiia – both because Marfa was not such an attractive woman, and because the fact of her infidelity hurt Aleksei less.
His favourite was to think of the weak, pathetic, aged Aleksei, seated in a bath of freezing water as Iuda dunked his head beneath the surface. But he always cut that memory short. It didn’t matter – I knew what happened next: how Iuda had been defeated by my mother, how, with Dmitry’s help, she had locked him in a cell beneath the Kremlin, and stolen a few precious hours with her father before his death.
But that was not a memory; the events had merely been recounted to me by Mama. I had few memories of my own that would be of any appeal to Iuda. He had no interest in anyone other than himself and for all I had dedicated my life to his destruction, we had only met twice – though I had observed him secretly on other occasions. I was happy to remind him of his incarceration beneath Geok Tepe, strapped to a wooden chair that was all he had known for three years; of his being captured and bound by Dmitry, his head locked in a scold’s bridle, and then of his being bundled into a crate. I loved to recollect the fight between him and Zmyeevich in Saint Isaac’s, when his body had been burned until almost nothing of it remained. Most of all I liked to relive the moment when I finally defeated him, as every molecule of his body had been reduced to ash by the light of the Yablochkov Candle. But even then, the memory could hurt me almost as much as it did him. I could not recall it without also hearing his words: ‘Tell Lyosha, it was …’
The sound of the biplanes became louder once again. They had begun dropping bombs on their return sweep; closer now – almost overhead. I stood close to the wall and inclined my ear towards the window above. They sounded like Friedrichshafens, although I couldn’t be sure. They’d brought out a new model, the G.III, at the beginning of 1917, but I’d never observed one. Then I heard the strangest sound: an explosion, close by, but not like any of the others. There was cracking and splintering, followed by an enormous roar. It took me a moment to realize that one of the bombs had landed on the frozen river, shattering the ice. I could only pray that no one had been trying to cross. Even if they weren’t caught by the blast, they wouldn’t last long in the freezing water. I was reminded of Iuda and Aleksei on the Berezina.