Fall of Giants

by Follett, Ken

  “It’s more than bravery,” Grigori said stoutly. “It’s heroism.”

  “What happened next?”

  They had walked into the city center, along with thousands of others. As the sun rose higher over the snowy city, Grigori unbuttoned his coat and unwound his scarf. It was a long walk for Lev’s short legs, but the boy was too shocked and scared to complain.

  At last they reached Nevsky Prospekt, the broad boulevard that ran through the heart of the city. It was already thronged with people. Streetcars and omnibuses drove up and down, and horse cabs dashed dangerously in all directions—in those days, Grigori recalled, there had been no motor taxis.

  They ran into Konstantin, a lathe operator from the Putilov works. He told Ma, ominously, that demonstrators had been killed in other parts of the city. But she did not break her pace, and the rest of the crowd seemed equally resolute. They moved steadily past shops selling German pianos, hats made in Paris, and special silver bowls to hold hothouse roses. In the jewelry stores there a nobleman could spend more on a bauble for his mistress than a factory worker would earn in a lifetime, Grigori had been told. They passed the Soleil Cinema, which Grigori longed to visit. Vendors were doing good business, selling tea from samovars and colored balloons for children.

  At the end of the street they came to three great St. Petersburg landmarks standing side by side on the bank of the frozen Neva River: the equestrian statue of Peter the Great, always called The Bronze Horseman; the Admiralty building with its spire; and the Winter Palace. When he had first seen the palace, at the age of twelve, he had refused to believe that such a large building could be a place for people to actually live. It seemed inconceivable, like something in a story, a magic sword or a cloak of invisibility.

  The square in front of the palace was white with snow. On the far side, ranged in front of the dark red building, were cavalry, riflemen in long coats, and cannon. The crowds massed around the edges of the square, keeping their distance, fearful of the military; but newcomers kept pouring in from the surrounding streets, like the waters of the tributaries emptying into the Neva, and Grigori was constantly pushed forward. Not all those present were workers, Grigori noted with surprise: many wore the warm coats of the middle classes on their way home from church, some looked like students, and a few even wore school uniforms.

  Ma prudently moved them away from the guns and into the Alexandrovskii Garden, a park in front of the long yellow-and-white Admiralty building. Other people had the same idea, and the crowd there became animated. The man who normally gave deer sled rides to middle-class children had gone home. Everyone there was talking of massacres: all over the city, marchers had been mown down by gunfire and hacked to death by Cossack sabres. Grigori spoke to a boy his own age and told him what had happened at the Narva Gate. As the demonstrators learned what had happened to others, they grew angrier.

  Grigori stared up at the long façade of the Winter Palace, with its hundreds of windows. Where was the tsar?

  “He was not at the Winter Palace that morning, as we found out later,” Grigori told Katerina, and he could hear in his own voice the bitter resentment of a disappointed believer. “He was not even in town. The father of his people had gone to his palace at Tsarskoye Selo, to spend the weekend taking country walks and playing dominoes. But we did not know that then, and we called to him, begging him to show himself to his loyal subjects.”

  The crowd grew; the calls for the tsar became more insistent; some of the demonstrators started to jeer at the soldiers. Everyone was becoming tense and angry. Suddenly a detachment of guards charged into the gardens, ordering everyone out. Grigori watched, fearful and incredulous, as they lashed out indiscriminately with whips, some using the flat sides of their sabres. He looked at Ma for guidance. She said: “We can’t give up now!” Grigori did not know what, exactly, they all expected the tsar to do: he just felt sure, as everyone did, that their monarch would somehow redress their grievances if only he knew about them.

  The other demonstrators were as resolute as Ma and, although those who were attacked by guards cowered away, no one left the area.

  Then the soldiers took up firing positions.

  Near the front, several people fell to their knees, took off their caps, and crossed themselves. “Kneel down!” said Ma, and the three of them knelt, as did more of the people around them, until most of the crowd had assumed the position of prayer.

  A silence descended that made Grigori scared. He stared at the rifles pointed at him, and the riflemen stared back expressionlessly, like statues.

  Then Grigori heard a bugle call.

  It was a signal. The soldiers fired their weapons. All around Grigori, people screamed and fell. A boy who had climbed a statue for a better view cried out and tumbled to the ground. A child fell out of a tree like a shot bird.

  Grigori saw Ma go facedown. Thinking she was avoiding the gunfire, he did the same. Then, looking at her as they both lay on the ground, he saw the blood, bright red on the snow around her head.

  “No!” he shouted. “No!”

  Lev screamed.

  Grigori grabbed Ma’s shoulders and pulled her up. Her body was limp. He stared at her face. At first he was bewildered by the sight that met his eyes. What was he seeing? Where her forehead and her eyes should have been there was just a mass of unrecognizable pulp.

  It was Lev who grasped the truth. “She’s dead!” he screamed. “Ma’s dead, my mother is dead!”

  The firing stopped. All around, people were running, limping, or crawling away. Grigori tried to think. What should he do? He must take Ma away from here, he decided. He put his arms under her and picked her up. She was not light, but he was strong.

  He turned around, looking for the way home. His vision was strangely blurred, and he realized he was weeping. “Come on,” he said to Lev. “Stop screaming. We have to go.”

  At the edge of the square they were stopped by an old man, the skin of his face creased around watery eyes. He wore the blue tunic of a factory worker. “You’re young,” he said to Grigori. There was anguish and rage in his voice. “Never forget this,” he said. “Never forget the murders committed here today by the tsar.”

  Grigori nodded. “I won’t forget, sir,” he said.

  “May you live long,” said the old man. “Long enough to take revenge on the bloodstained tsar for the evil he has done this day.”

  { VIII }

  “I carried her for about a mile, then I got tired, so I boarded a streetcar, still holding her,” Grigori told Katerina.

  She stared at him. Her beautiful, bruised face was pale with horror. “You carried your dead mother home on a streetcar?”

  He shrugged. “At the time I had no idea I was doing anything strange. Or, rather, everything that happened that day was so strange that nothing I did seemed odd.”

  “What about the people riding the car?”

  “The conductor said nothing. I suppose he was too shocked to throw me off, and he didn’t ask me for the fare—which I would not have been able to pay, of course.”

  “So you just sat down?”

  “I sat there, with her body in my arms, and Lev beside me, crying. The passengers just stared at us. I didn’t care what they thought. I was concentrating on what I had to do, which was to get her home.”

  “And so you became the head of your family, at the age of sixteen.”

  Grigori nodded. Although the memories were painful, he felt the most intense pleasure from her concentrated attention. Her eyes were fixed on him, and she listened with her mouth open and a look on her lovely face of mingled fascination and horror.

  “What I remember most about that time is that no one helped us,” he said, and he was revisited by the panicky feeling that he was alone in a hostile world. The memory never failed to fill his soul with rage. It’s over now, he told himself; I’ve got a home and a job, and my brother has grown up strong and handsome. The bad times are over. But nevertheless he wanted to take someone by the nec
k—a soldier, a policeman, a government minister, or the tsar himself—and squeeze until there was no life left. He closed his eyes, shuddering, until the feeling passed.

  “As soon as the funeral was over, the landlord threw us out, saying we would not be able to pay; and he took our furniture—for back rent, he said, although Ma was never behind with payments. I went to the church and told the priest we had nowhere to sleep.”

  Katerina laughed harshly. “I can guess what happened there.”

  He was surprised. “Can you?”

  “The priest offered you a bed—his bed. That’s what happened to me.”

  “Something like that,” Grigori said. “He gave me a few kopeks and sent me to buy hot potatoes. The shop wasn’t where he said, but instead of searching for it I hurried back to the church, because I didn’t like the look of him. Sure enough, when I went into the vestry he was taking Lev’s trousers down.”

  She nodded. “Priests have been doing that sort of thing to me since I was twelve.”

  Grigori was shocked. He had assumed that that particular priest was uniquely evil. Katerina obviously believed that depravity was the norm. “Are they all like that?” he said angrily.

  “Most of them, in my experience.”

  He shook his head in disgust. “And you know what amazed me the most? When I caught him, he wasn’t even ashamed! He just looked annoyed, as if I had interrupted him while he was meditating on the Bible.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I told Lev to do up his trousers, and we left. The priest asked for his kopeks back, but I told him they were alms for the poor. I used them to pay for a bed in a lodging house that night.”

  “And then?”

  “Eventually I got a good enough job, by lying about my age, and I found a room, and I learned, day by day, how to be independent.”

  “And now you’re happy?”

  “Certainly not. My mother intended us to have a better life, and I’m going to make sure of it. We’re leaving Russia. I’ve saved up almost enough money. I’m going to America, and when I get there I’ll send money back for a ticket for Lev. They have no tsar in America—no emperor or king of any kind. The army can’t just shoot anyone they like. The people rule the country!”

  She was skeptical. “Do you really believe that?”

  “It’s true!”

  There was a tap at the window. Katerina was startled—they were on the second floor—but Grigori knew it was Lev. Late at night, when the door of the house was locked, Lev had to cross the railway line to the backyard, climb onto the washhouse roof, and come in through the window.

  Grigori opened up and Lev climbed in. He was dressed smartly, in a jacket with mother-of-pearl buttons and a cap with a velvet band. His waistcoat sported a brass watch chain. His hair was cut in the fashionable “Polish” style with a parting at the side, instead of down the middle as the peasants wore it. Katerina looked surprised, and Grigori guessed she had not expected his brother to be so dashing.

  Normally Grigori was pleased to see Lev, and relieved if he was sober and in one piece. Now he wished he could have had longer alone with Katerina.

  He introduced them, and Lev’s eyes gleamed with interest as he shook her hand. She wiped tears from her cheeks. “Grigori was telling me about the death of your mother,” she explained.

  “He has been mother and father to me for nine years,” Lev said. He tilted his head and sniffed the air. “And he makes good stew.”

  Grigori got out bowls and spoons, and put a loaf of black bread on the table. Katerina explained to Lev about the fight with the policeman Pinsky. The way she told the story made Grigori seem braver than he felt, but he was happy to be a hero in her eyes.

  Lev was enchanted by Katerina. He leaned forward, listening as if he had never heard anything so fascinating, smiling and nodding, looking amazed or disgusted, according to what she was saying.

  Grigori spooned the stew into bowls and pulled the packing case up to the table for use as a third chair. The food was good: he had added an onion to the pot, and the ham bone gave a hint of meaty richness to the turnips. The atmosphere lightened as Lev talked of inconsequential matters, odd incidents at the factory and funny things people said. He kept Katerina laughing.

  When they had finished, Lev asked Katerina how she came to be in the city.

  “My father died and my mother remarried,” she said. “Unfortunately, my stepfather seemed to like me better than my mother.” She tossed her head, and Grigori could not tell whether she was ashamed or defiant. “At any rate, that’s what my mother believed, and she threw me out.”

  Grigori said: “Half the population of St. Petersburg have come here from a village. Soon there will be no one left to till the soil.”

  Lev said: “What was your journey like?”

  It was a familiar tale of third-class railway tickets and lifts begged on carts, but Grigori was mesmerized by her face as she talked.

  Once again Lev listened with rapt attention, making amusing comments, asking the occasional question.

  Soon, Grigori noticed, Katerina had turned in her seat and was talking exclusively to Lev.

  Almost, Grigori thought, as if I was not even here.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  March 1914

  “So,” Billy said to his father, “all the books of the Bible were originally written in various languages and then translated into English.”

  “Aye,” said Da. “And the Roman Catholic Church tried to ban translations—they didn’t want people like us reading the Bible for ourselves and arguing with the priests.”

  Da was a bit un-Christian when he spoke of Catholics. He seemed to hate Catholicism more than atheism. But he loved an argument. “Well, then,” said Billy, “where are the originals?”

  “What originals?”

  “The original books of the Bible, written in Hebrew and Greek. Where are they kept?”

  They were sitting on opposite sides of the square table in the kitchen of the house in Wellington Row. It was midafternoon. Billy was home from the pit and had washed his hands and face, but still wore his work clothes. Da had hung up his suit jacket, and sat in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves, with a collar and tie—he would be going out again after dinner, to a union meeting. Mam was heating the stew on the fire. Gramper sat with them, listening to the discussion with a faint smile, as if he had heard it all before.

  “Well, we don’t have the actual originals,” Da said. “They wore out, centuries ago. We have copies.”

  “Where are the copies, then?”

  “All different places—monasteries, museums . . . ”

  “They should be kept in one place.”

  “But there’s more than one copy of each book—and some are better than others.”

  “How can one copy be better than another? Surely they’re not different.”

  “Yes. Over the years, human error crept in.”

  This startled Billy. “Well, how do we know which is right?”

  “That’s a study called textual scholarship—comparing the different versions and coming up with an agreed text.”

  Billy was shocked. “You mean there isn’t an indisputable book that is the actual Word of God? Men argue about it and make a judgment?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, how do we know they’re right?”

  Da smiled knowingly, a sure sign that his back was to the wall. “We believe that if they work in prayerful humility, God will guide their labors.”

  “But what if they don’t?”

  Mam put four bowls on the table. “Don’t argue with your father,” she said. She cut four thick slices off a loaf of bread.

  Gramper said: “Leave him be, Cara my girl. Let the boy ask his questions.”

  Da said: “We have faith in God’s power to ensure that his Word comes to us as he would wish.”

  “You’re completely illogical!”

  Mam interrupted again. “Don’t speak to your father like that! You’re still a bo
y, you don’t know anything.”

  Billy ignored her. “Why didn’t God guide the labors of the copiers, and stop them making mistakes, if he really wanted us to know His Word?”

  Da said: “Some things are not given to us to understand.”

  That answer was the least convincing of all, and Billy ignored it. “If the copiers could make mistakes, obviously the textual scholars could too.”

  “We must have faith, Billy.”

  “Faith in the Word of God, yes—not faith in a lot of professors of Greek!”

  Mam sat at the table and pushed her graying hair out of her eyes. “So you are right, and everyone else is wrong, as usual, I suppose?”

  This frequently used ploy always stung him, because it seemed justified. It was not possible that he was wiser than everyone else. “It’s not me,” he protested. “It’s logic!”

  “Oh, you and your old logic,” said his mother. “Eat your dinner.”

  The door opened and Mrs. Dai Ponies walked in. This was normal in Wellington Row: only strangers knocked. Mrs. Dai wore a pinafore and a man’s boots on her feet: whatever she had to say was so urgent that she had not even put on a hat before leaving her house. Visibly agitated, she brandished a sheet of paper. “I’m being thrown out!” she said. “What am I supposed to do?”

  Da stood up and gave her his chair. “Sit down by here and catch your breath, Mrs. Dai Ponies,” he said calmly. “Let me have a read of that letter, now.” He took it from her red, knotted hand and laid it flat on the table.

  Billy could see that it was typed on the letterhead of Celtic Minerals.

  “‘Dear Mrs. Evans,’” Da read aloud. “‘The house at the above address is now required for a working miner.’” Celtic Minerals had built most of the houses in Aberowen. Over the years, some had been sold to their occupiers, including the one the Williams family lived in; but most were still rented to miners. “‘In accordance with the terms of your lease, I—’” Da paused, and Billy could see he was shocked. “‘I hereby give you two weeks’ notice to quit!’” he finished.

  Mam said: “Notice to quit—and her husband buried not six weeks ago!”