Unreal season. Unreal city. As he looked back over the last ten years of his life, and thought of the strange events of that day, it seemed to Alexander that his whole existence had been like a tiny walk-on part on this huge St Petersburg stage-set. For wasn’t it all just a play? Wasn’t poor Empress Catherine with her young lovers a pathetic personal sham? Wasn’t this huge city, built on a northern marsh, with its Italian façades gazing over an icebound wasteland, another kind of improbable deception? The city is built on wooden piles, he thought. One day they will rot and it will all fall back into the marshes. Wasn’t the enlightened noble class to which he belonged the greatest sham of all – speaking of Voltaire, yet ruling as it did over a vast empire of villages and serfs, stuck in the Middle Ages, or even the Dark Ages, if truth be told? Was Peter the Great’s vision of Russia as a great Continental Empire – wasn’t the boundless energy and ambition of the Bronze Horseman – just a wild dream, impossible ever of being achieved? As he stared over the huge river and then looked back at the great open space beside the palace, he suddenly had an overwhelming sense that the vast Russian land of marsh and forest might advance, at any moment, into the emptiness of this unnatural city.
‘Why, the whole city,’ he murmured aloud, ‘is just a huge Potemkin village – a façade. And if so, what has my life been – my gamble for power, my love of display, my desire for earthly and even heavenly rewards? Was it all a great illusion?’
It seemed to him, at that moment, that it was so. As he slowly made his way home, revolving this thought in his mind, he would glance up from time to time to notice a piece of broken-off stucco here, or the rotting bricks on the corners of the houses there, and murmur to himself: ‘Yes, it is vanity. All is vanity.’
And so deep in contemplation of this grand futility was Alexander that, returning at last in the early morning, he did not even notice the little carriage standing in front of his house, or the group of men who stood waiting to receive him. So that he looked up in astonishment as one of them stepped forward and said to him quietly: ‘State Councillor Bobrov, you are to accompany us. You are under arrest.’
The cell was pitch black. There was no light from any source.
He did not know how long he had been there but since the door had half opened, twice, and a hand had pushed in a crust of bread and a small pitcher of water, he supposed it must be between one and two days.
The cell was very small. If he stood with his back to the heavy door and reached out his right hand and his left, he could place the palms flat against the two walls. From this position he discovered he could take two full paces before his head hit the wall opposite. The first few hours he thought there was a rat in one corner; but now he was not sure. Perhaps it had found a hole somewhere and gone away. For this was the dreaded Peter and Paul Fortress. He wondered whether the cell was above or below the water level. Below, he thought.
Only one thing puzzled him. Why had they arrested him? For what crime? The arresting officer had not told him – probably had not known. And since they had thrown him in here, no one had spoken to him. There was only one thing to do: keep calm.
Another day passed. No one came. He wondered if they would leave him there to die. Then, at the end of the third day, the door opened and they pulled him out, and a few minutes later he found himself standing, rather unsteadily, in a large room, blinking at the pain of the light, and becoming vaguely aware of the fact that, after his confinement, he was stinking. There was a single guard in the room and when Alexander asked him what was going on he replied gruffly: ‘You’ll be questioned.’
‘Oh. By whom?’
‘Don’t you know?’ The guard grinned. ‘By Sheshkovsky himself, of course.’ Then he laughed. ‘You’ll talk.’
And now, despite his determination to be calm, Alexander trembled. Everyone knew about Sheshkovsky – the most feared inquisitor in all Russia. The great interrogator had easily broken poor Radishchev, the radical writer. They said that his victims were lucky if they lived. Yet, Alexander reminded himself, I am a noble. By law he can’t torture me. He can’t give me the knout. The court had to strip him of his noble status before he could suffer those indignities.
He was still thinking nervously about these matters when he felt hands forcing him to sit on a bench. A table was put in front of him, with a lamp on it. Then, a moment later, he became aware of another figure in the room – somewhere out in the shadows, past the bright lamp – a figure he could not see but whose voice he could hear.
‘So,’ said the voice quietly, ‘tell me about Colovion.’
In the three weeks that followed, Alexander Bobrov was often confused. Some days they would leave him alone in his cell; but usually they would wait until he was falling asleep and then drag him back to the lighted room and shine the lamp in his eyes, or force him to move about so that he could not sleep.
His inquisitor came at irregular intervals. At first Alexander thought this was a ploy, but after a time it seemed to him that the inquisitor had other business elsewhere, and that he, Alexander, might be of only marginal interest. Yet each time he asked why they were keeping him there, the reply was indirect, and therefore all the more frightening: ‘I think you know, State Councillor,’ or, ‘Perhaps you would like to tell me, Alexander Prokofievich.’
They did not use torture: they did not threaten him with the knout. Yet no torture, he realized, can be worse than never being allowed to sleep. As for the interrogator, Alexander understood now why he was so feared. It’s not what he does to your body, he thought. It’s what he does to your soul.
For gradually, session after session, day after day, the inquisitor was taking over his mind.
It was a subtle process. When, for instance, he had denied all knowledge of Colovion, the interrogator had not contradicted him. But towards the end of the session, quietly, imperturbably, he had let Alexander know by a few words that he knew about the professor and the Rosicrucian circle. So he had probably been interrogating the professor too, Alexander realized. Yet how did he know about their connection? There were no written records. Had the professor talked? Perhaps. It began to occur to him that the interrogator might not be seeking information from him at all, but only trying to discover how much he would lie.
It was the same when they discussed other matters. His interrogator wanted to know about the articles he had written, years ago, on subjects like the emancipation of serfs. Yet those articles had been anonymous. No one knew who had written them. How was it then that, each time he denied having done so, the invisible voice would quietly accept his assertion and then, with incredible accuracy, recite a line or two that he had written perhaps an entire decade before?
Slowly, as the process continued and the gentle, reasonable voice, never accusing, allowed him to see, again and again, that he knew the truth, Alexander, to his own surprise, began to feel guilty.
By the seventh day, it seemed to Alexander that the interrogator knew everything there was to know about him. By the fourteenth day, it seemed to his confused brain that the interrogator knew more about him than he did himself. By the twentieth day, Alexander knew that the interrogator was all-knowing, god-like. What reason was there to try to hide anything from this voice – this kindly voice, which was only helping him to open his heart, and then at last to sleep?
On the twenty-first day, he talked.
It was a cool, damp October morning when Alexander Bobrov left the Peter and Paul Fortress, with his hands and feet manacled, and sitting in the back of a little open cart. In the front sat the driver and a soldier with a musket. There were two outriders.
The sky was grey. The waters of the Neva were high, and above the Admiralty he could see the little flags flying which warned that there was a risk of flooding. For it was not unusual, at such a season, for the waters of the Gulf of Finland to sweep in past Vasilevsky Island and take over the cellars and even the streets of the city of Peter.
Strangely, Alexander felt at peace with the world. Though
manacled, he sat quite calmly, almost cheerfully, and watched the great city go by. His clothes were in tatters, his head bare, yet it did not seem to concern him unduly. In the distance, across the river, he caught a glimpse of the Bronze Horseman. There was the Winter Palace and the Hermitage. The empress and her lover Zubov were in there somewhere, no doubt. Good luck to them.
It was odd: he had lost everything, yet he actually felt more comfortable now than he had done in years. Here in a cart, his head bare to the elements, he felt absolved of all earthly cares. Perhaps it was personal to Alexander, or perhaps it was a trait often found in Russia, but he realized that he only felt truly himself at life’s extremes. It was as though he had never really felt comfortable when he was striving for mediocrity, as he had been these last few years. Give me a palace, he considered, or a monk’s cell.
Anyway, he had been lucky. He had only been sentenced to ten years.
He had learned of it the day before. For several weeks now, he had been in a small cell with a window. He had not been allowed any visitors, nor any news of the outside world. He still did not even know what crimes he had been charged with. Then, that morning, the interrogator had come and told him his sentence.
‘Your trial went well,’ he blandly announced. Like other such trials, it had been a brief, informal affair at which the accused himself had not been present. ‘The empress had wanted to give you fifteen years. That’s what we gave your friend the professor. But your wife wrote to the empress – a very fine letter, I must say – and so we’ve been lenient. In fact, you’ve been even luckier than that. But I’ll let your wife tell you about it.’
Tatiana had come a few hours later. It was only now that he learned that the countess was still alive. ‘But she has told everyone in St Petersburg that you tried to murder her,’ Tatiana explained. ‘She went to the police that very night and told them to arrest you. And then,’ she paused, ‘it seems there were other charges.’ She looked at him anxiously. ‘They say you were a Freemason. I do not understand.’
He sighed. He thought he was beginning to.
The crackdown of Catherine the Great on the Freemasons in the summer of 1792 was sudden. It was probably caused by Novikov when, under questioning, he had inadvertently revealed the existence of the secret inner order of Rosicrucians. Historical evidence shows that, even afterwards, the authorities had only a very imperfect idea of how the order worked. Since the Rosicrucians always burned all their correspondence, the full membership was never established. The links to Grand Duke Paul were never proved; the international network only vaguely understood. But the empress was adamant. The order was secret, its members probably radical; they might be plotting with her son. She trusted no one, nowadays. They were to be eliminated.
The business, it must be said, was planned intelligently. The men with important connections, like the prince, were to be quietly exiled to their estates. The bookseller who had sold Masonic tracts would be arrested and let out with a terrible warning. The professor was to be made an example of. ‘But I wish,’ the empress had declared, ‘we had someone to make an example of from St Petersburg as well as Moscow.’
It was most fortunate therefore, on the very eve of the crackdown, that the inquisitor Sheshkovsky should have come to her with the surprising news: ‘I think we may have discovered just the man we need. Moreover,’ he added, ‘it seems the fellow’s a dangerous radical.’ And the empress, when she heard who it was, had been delighted.
But how, Alexander wondered, had they known so much about him? Tatiana soon supplied the answers.
‘Madame de Ronville told me what was happening,’ she explained. ‘She came to see me after you were arrested. It seems there was a letter of some kind that the countess had – from Professor Novikov the Freemason. She didn’t know what it was, but she showed it to the authorities. She was using anything she could find to have you prosecuted.’
Alexander could imagine it.
‘Then a man called Sheshkovsky went to see her. Do you know him?’
‘Yes, I know him.’
‘He spent a whole afternoon talking to her. She showed him a lot of articles you had written, years ago. He was very interested.’
‘I expect he was.’ He could imagine the scene: the old countess and the skilful interrogator. How easy it would have been for the inquisitor to get the information he wanted out of her. How the subtle fellow must have smiled to himself, and no wonder he had seemed to know everything!
And yet … even as Alexander considered the matter, a new and even grimmer thought suddenly came into his mind. Had the interrogator cunningly coaxed the information out of the foolish old lady, or, in a terrible act of irony, was it possible that she had done it deliberately: revealed those articles to him – the very articles she had praised and which represented her own, most passionate views – knowing that they would seal Alexander’s fate?
He would never know.
‘Yes,’ he said sadly. ‘She had her revenge.’
‘There is one piece of good news though,’ Tatiana told him. ‘You are not to be imprisoned in a fortress, like the professor. Guess where your prison is?’
Alexander had looked blank.
‘You’re to be imprisoned in the monastery,’ she smiled. ‘At Russka.’
And so it was, he reflected, as the little cart bumped out of the city on that chilly October morning, that Empress Catherine had, in the end, found a use for Bobrov the gambler after all.
1796
How slow, how quiet, was the passing of the years.
He would listen to the bell that tolled the monks to prayer, and by this means would always know the hour. Yet sometimes it seemed to Alexander that the little monastery was half-empty: one day, he fancied, he might wake up to silence – which would tell him that the remaining monks were gone, leaving him alone in his cell with only his strange companion.
The cell was quite spacious; its walls were painted white, and there was a high, barred window. With a small jump he could catch hold of the bars, pull himself up and look out of the top of the monastery wall at one of the corner towers, also painted white. So he could see the outside world – the sky at least.
They let him have books, but no writing materials. One of the monks gave him a book of psalms. Every month Tatiana, who spent most of the time at Russka, was allowed to visit him, and usually she brought the children. Indeed, if I were ready to be a hermit, I should almost be contented, he thought.
And so the years passed quietly – almost, one could say, untroubled – but for certain thoughts that occurred to him by day; and at night, by a certain dream.
How strange it was to be so near one of his own estates, yet so far. The place was much the same as in former times – and yet it was not. The monastery, certainly, was only a shadow of its former self. When he had visited it as a young boy, it had still owned the lands around as far as his own estate of Dirty Place. But since Catherine had taken over all the Church lands, the peasants who worked them all belonged to the state now. The monastery was no longer the local landed power, but only a rather forlorn collection of religious buildings, set in the midst of state-owned fields. As a young man he had welcomed the change. ‘Let the Church stick to religion,’ he had said. But now, even cut off in his cell, he could sense the different atmosphere in the place, and he was not so sure. Part of Old Russia had gone from the land; the monastery had been hollowed out, into an empty shell.
It was never a prison before, either, Alexander reflected. But twenty years ago, Catherine had decided that the little Russka monastery would be a convenient place to keep prisoners awaiting trial, and it had been used that way ever since. Nowadays, however, there were just two prisoners, both kept in the same cell: Alexander and his curious companion.
Was it chance, or some malicious afterthought of the empress, that had caused Alexander to be put in a cell with this fellow? Probably the latter.
He was very tall and gaunt, a little older than Alexander, with a long, s
traggling black beard and deepset black eyes that gazed out from their hollows with a kind of fervent intensity. It had seemed strange, therefore, given the complete absence of physical likeness, that he should have announced to Alexander, on their first day together, that he was none other than Catherine’s husband, the late Tsar Peter.
He was entirely harmless. At some time the empress must have decided he was a nuisance and locked him up. Perhaps he had been forgotten. Who was he? Alexander guessed he was a state peasant from somewhere in the north. The fellow could not read or write and mostly sat there, staring fervently at the wall: occasionally he would speak, earnestly, about Holy Russia, and denounce the empress as an atheist and a harlot. When he did so, Alexander would quietly nod and say: ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’ In his own mind he called the man, like the pretenders of olden times, the False Peter. They shared the cell quite peaceably.
The thoughts that disturbed his peace of mind by day took many months to form. Indeed, at first he was not even aware that they were taking shape.
When Tatiana came, Alexander was taken to another cell, where they were allowed to talk undisturbed. He enjoyed these meetings. Tatiana was always very calm and quietly affectionate. She would sit there with the children and give him news of the outside world. Thus he learned about the terrible events in France: how the Jacobins had executed the King and his poor Queen Marie Antoinette. He heard how Catherine and her son Paul were on worse terms than ever, and that it seemed increasingly likely she would try to pass him over for her grandsons. He learned that Poland, finally, had been completely taken over by her neighbouring powers and that most of it was now, virtually, a Russian province. ‘One cannot deny,’ Tatiana remarked, ‘that Empress Catherine has been hugely successful.’
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