by Boris Akunin
CHAPTER 2
The man of steel rests
Seven hundred and eighty-two, seven hundred and eighty-three, seven hundred and eighty-four ...
The lean, muscular man with the stony face, calm grey eyes and resolute vertical crease in the centre of his forehead lay on the parquet floor, counting the beats of his own heart. The count proceeded automatically, without involving his thoughts or hindering them in any way. When the man was lying down, each heartbeat was precisely one second - that had been verified many times. The old habit, acquired during imprisonment at hard labour, of listening to the workings of his internal motor while he rested had become such an integral part of the man's very existence that sometimes he would wake in the middle of the night with a four-figure number in his mind and realise that he hadn't stopped counting even in his sleep.
There was a point to this arithmetic: it trained and disciplined his heart, heightened his endurance, strengthened his will and -most importantly - allowed him to relax his muscles and restore his strength in the space of only fifteen minutes (nine hundred heartbeats) just as well as he could have done in three hours of sound sleep. Once the man had had to go without sleep for a long time, when the common convicts in the Akatuisk penal prison had decided to kill him. Too afraid to come near him during the day, they had waited for darkness to come, and the same scene had been played out over and over again for many nights in a row.
The practice of lying on a hard surface had remained with him since the days of his early youth, when Green (that was what his comrades called him - no one knew his real name) had worked hard to develop his self-discipline and wean himself of everything that he regarded as 'luxury', including in this category any habits that were harmful or simply unnecessary for survival.
He could hear muted voices behind the closed door: the members of the Combat Group were excitedly discussing the details of the successful operation. Sometimes Bullfinch got carried away and raised his voice, and then the other two hissed at him. They thought Green was asleep. But he wasn't sleeping. He was resting, counting the beats of his heart and thinking about the old man who had grabbed hold of his wrist just before he died. He could still feel the touch of those dry, hot fingers on his skin. It prevented him from feeling any satisfaction in the neat execution of the operation - and the grey-eyed man had no other pleasures apart from the feeling of duty fulfilled.
Green knew the English meaning of his alias, but he experienced his own colour differently. Everything in the world had a colour, every object and concept, every person - that was something Green had felt since he was a little child; it was one of the special things about him. For instance, the word 'earth' was a clay-brown colour, the word 'apple' was bright pink even for a green winter apple, 'empire' was maroon, 'father' was a dense purple and 'mother' was crimson. Even the letters of the alphabet had their own coloration: 'A' was scarlet, 'B' was bright lemon-yellow, 'C was pale yellow. Green made no attempt to analyse why for him the sound and meaning of a thing, a phenomenon or a person had these particular colours and no others - he simply took note of this information, and the information rarely misled him. The fact was that every colour also had its own secret meaning on a scale that was an integral, fundamental element of Green's soul. Blue was doubt and unreliability, white was joy, red was sadness, and that made the Russian flag a strange combination: it had joy and sadness, both of them strangely equivocal. If the glow given off by a new acquaintance was blue, Green didn't exacdy regard him with overt mistrust, but he watched a person like that closely and assessed him with particular caution. And there was another thing: people were the only items in the whole of existence capable of changing their colour over time - as a result of their own actions, the company they kept and their age.
Green himself had once been sky-blue: soft, warm, amorphous. Later, when he decided to change himself, the sky-blue had faded and been gradually supplanted by an austere, limpid ash-grey. In time the once dominant light-blue tones had receded somewhere deep inside, reduced to secondary tints, and Green had become bright grey, like Damask steel - just as hard, supple, cold and resistant to rust.
The transformation had begun at the age of sixteen. Before that Green had been an ordinary grammar-school pupil - he used to paint landscapes in watercolour, recite poetry by Nekrasov and Lermontov, fall in love. But, of course, even then he had been different from his classmates - if only because they were all Russian and he was not. They didn't persecute him in the classroom, or bait him with being a 'Yid', because they could sense the future man of steel's intensity of feeling and calm, imperturbable strength; but he had no friends and he could not have had. The other pupils skipped lessons, talked back to the teachers and copied from cribs, but Green was obliged to earn top marks in every subject and conduct himself in the most exemplary fashion, because otherwise he would have been expelled, and that would have been too much for his father to bear.
The sky-blue youth would have gone on to graduate from the grammar school, then become a university student and after that a doctor, or perhaps - who could tell? - an artist, if the Governor General Chirkov had not suddenly taken it into his head that there were too many Jews in the city and given instructions for all the pharmacists, dentists and tradesmen who did not possess a permit to reside outside the pale to be sent back to their home towns. Green's father was a pharmacist, and so the family found itself back in the small southern town that Grinberg senior had left many years before in order to acquire a clean, respectable profession.
Green's natural response to such malicious, stupid injustice was one of genuine bewilderment, which passed through the stages of acute physical suffering and seething fury before it culminated in a craving for retaliation.
There was a lot of malicious, stupid injustice around. The juvenile Green had agonised over it earlier, but so far he had managed to pretend that he had more important things to do: justify his father's hopes, learn a useful trade, search within himself and grasp the reason why he had appeared in the world. But now that the inexorable locomotive of malicious stupidity had come hurtling down the rails straight at Green, puffing out menacing steam and tossing him aside down the embankment, it was impossible to resist the inner voice that demanded action.
All that year Green was left to his own devices. He was supposedly preparing to sit the final grammar-school examinations as an external student. And he did read a great deal: Gibbon, Locke, Mill, Guizot. He wanted to understand why people tormented each other, where injustice came from and what was the best way of putting it right. There was no direct answer to be found in the books, but with a little bit of serious thought, it could be read between the lines.
If society was not to become overgrown with scum like a stagnant pond, it needed the periodical shaking-up known as revolution. The advanced nations were those that had passed through this painful but necessary process - and the earlier the better. A class that had been on top for too long became necrotic, like callused skin, the pores of the country became blocked and, as society gradually smothered, life lost its meaning and rule became arbitrary. The state fell into dilapidation, like a house that has not been repaired for a long time, and once the process of disintegration had gone too far, there was no longer any point in propping and patching up the rotten structure. It had to be burned down, and a sturdy new house with bright windows built on the site of the fire.
But conflagrations did not simply happen of their own accord. There had to be people willing to take on the role of the match that would be consumed in starting the great fire. The mere thought of such a fate took Green's breath away. He was willing to be a match and to be consumed, but he realised that his assent alone was not enough. Also required were a will of steel, Herculean strength and irreproachable moral purity.
He had been born with a strong will; all he needed to do was develop it. So he devised an entire course of exercises for overcoming his own weaknesses - his main enemies. To conquer his fear of heights he spent hours at night wa
lking backwards and forwards along the parapet of the railway bridge, forcing himself to keep his eyes fixed on the black, oily water below. To conquer his squeamishness he caught vipers in the forest and stared intently into their repulsive, hissing mouths while their spotted, springy whiplash bodies coiled furiously round his naked arm. To conquer his shyness he travelled to the fair at the district town and sang to the accompaniment of a barrel organ, and his listeners rolled around in laughter, because the sullen little Jewish half-wit had no voice and no ear.
Herculean strength was harder to obtain. Nature had given Green robust health, but made him ungainly and narrow-boned. For week after week, month after month, he spent ten, twelve or fourteen hours a day developing his physical strength. He followed his own method, dividing the muscles into those that were necessary and those that were not, and wasting no time on the unnecessary ones. He began by training his fingers and continued until he could bend a five-kopeck piece or even a three-kopeck piece between his thumb and forefinger. Then he turned his attention to his fists, pounding an inch-thick plank until his knuckles were broken and bloody, smearing the abrasions with iodine and then pounding again, until his fists were covered with calluses and the wood broke at his very first blow. In order to develop his shoulders, he took a job at a flour mill, carrying sacks that weighed four poods. He developed his stomach and waist with French gymnastics and his legs by riding a bicycle up hills and carrying it down them.
It was moral purity that gave him the greatest difficulty. Green quickly succeeded in renouncing intemperate eating habits and excessive domestic comfort, even though his mother cried when he toughened his will by fasting or went off to sleep on the sheet-metal roof on a rainy October night. But he was simply unable to deny his physiological needs. Fasting didn't help, nor did a hundred pull-ups on his patented English exercise bar. One day he decided to fight fire with fire and induce in himself an aversion to sexual activity. He went to the district town and hired the most repulsive slut at the station. It didn't work - in fact it only made things worse; and he was left with nothing but his willpower to rely on.
Green spent a year and four months whittling himself into a match. He still hadn't decided where he would find the box against which he was destined to be struck before being consumed in flame, but he already knew that blood would have to be spilled and he prepared himself thoroughly. He practised shooting at a target until he never missed. He learned to grab a knife out of his belt with lightning speed and throw it to hit a small melon at twelve paces. He pored over chemistry textbooks and manufactured an explosive mixture to his own formula.
He followed the activities of the resolute members of the People's Will party with trepidation as they pursued their unprecedented hunt of the Tsar himself. But somehow the Tsar evaded them: the autocrat was protected by a mysterious power that miraculously saved his life over and over again.
Green waited. He had begun to suspect what this mysterious power might be, but was still afraid to believe in such incredible good fortune. Could history really have chosen him, Grigory Grinberg, as its instrument? After all, he was still no more than a boy, only one of hundreds or even thousands of youngsters who dreamed, just as he did, of a brief life as a blazing match.
His wait came to an end one day in March when the surface of the long-frozen river waters cracked and buckled and the ice began to move.
Green had been mistaken. History had not chosen him, but another boy a few years older. He threw a bomb that shattered the Emperor's legs and his own chest. When he came to for a moment just before dying and was asked his name, he replied, 'I don't know,' then he was gone. His contemporaries showered curses on him, but he had earned the eternal gratitude of posterity.
Fate had enticed Green and duped him, but she did not abandon him. She did not release him from her iron embrace, but picked him up and dragged him, confused and numb with disappointment, along a circuitous route towards his goal.
The pogrom began when the pharmacist's son was away from the little town. Consumed by an insatiable, jealous curiosity, he had gone to Kiev to find out the details of the regicide - the newspaper reports had been vague, for the most part emphasising the effusive outpourings of loyal subjects.
On Sunday morning the alarm bell sounded in the Orthodox quarter on the other side of the river, where the goys lived. The community had sent their tavern-keeper, Mitrii Kuzmich, to Belotserkovsk on a special errand and he had returned, bringing confirmation that the rumours were true: the Emperor-Tsar had been killed by Yids - which meant you could give the sheenies a good beating with no fear of the consequences.
The crowd set off across the railway bridge that divided the little town into two parts, Orthodox and Jewish. They walked in a calm, orderly fashion, carrying church banners and singing. When they were met by representatives of the other community - the rabbi, the director of the Jewish college and the market warden - they did nothing to them, but they did not listen to them either. They simply pushed them aside and spread out through the quiet, narrow streets where the closed shutters stared at them blindly. They spent a long time wondering where to start, waiting for the impulse they needed to unlock the doors of their souls.
The tavern-keeper himself set things moving: he stove in the door of a tavern that had opened the previous year and ruined his trade. The crashing and clattering dispelled the people's lethargy, and put them in the right mood.
Everything happened just the way it was supposed to: they fired the synagogue, rummaged through the little houses, broke a few men's ribs, dragged a few around by their sidelocks and in the evening, when the barrels of wine hidden in the tavern's cellar were discovered, some of the lads even got their hands on the Yids' young wenches.
It was still light as they made their way back, bearing off their bales of plunder and drunks. Before they dispersed, the whole community decided not to work the next day, because it was a sin to work when the people were grieving so badly, but to go across the river again.
When Green came back that evening the little town was unrecognisable: broken doors, feathers and fluff drifting in the air, a smell of smoke and from the windows the sound of women wailing and children crying.
His parents had survived by sitting it out in the stone cellar, but the house was in an appalling state: the anti-Semites had smashed more than they had taken, and they had dealt most viciously of all with the books - in their furious zeal they had torn the pages out of all five hundred volumes.
Green found the sight of his father's white face and trembling lips unbearable. His father told him that the pharmacy had been ransacked in the morning, because there was medical alcohol there. But that was not the most terrible thing. They had smashed in the old tsaddik Belkin's head, and he had died, and because the cobbler's wife Gesa refused to give them her daughter, they had chopped away half of her face with an axe. The next day the mob would come again. The people had collected together nine hundred and fifty roubles and taken the money to the district police officer and the police officer had taken it, saying he would go to fetch a troop of armed men, and left, but he would not be back before the following morning, so they would have to endure yet more suffering.
As Green listened, he blanched in his terrible mortification. Was this what fate had been preparing him for? - not a blinding flash erupting from beneath the wheels of a gilded carriage with a thunderclap that would echo round the world, but a senseless death under the cudgels of a drunken rabble? - In a remote backwater, for the sake of wretched people in whom he felt no interest, with whom he had nothing in common? He couldn't even understand their hideous dialect properly, because he had always spoken Russian at home. Their customs seemed savage and absurd to him, and he himself was a stranger to them, the half-crazy son of a Jew who hadn't wanted to live like a Jew (and what, I ask you, had come of that?).
But the stupidity and malice of the world demanded retaliation, and Green knew that he had no choice.
In the morning the bell sounded a
gain in the goys' quarter and a dense crowd, more numerous than the previous day's, set off from the marketplace towards the bridge. They weren't singing today. After the wine from the tavern and the neat alcohol from the pharmacy, they were bleary-eyed, but still brisk and determined. Many of them were dragging along trolleys and wheelbarrows. Walking at the front with an icon in his hands was the man of the moment, Mitrii Kuzmich, wearing a red shirt and a new knee-length coat of good-quality cloth.
Stepping on to the bridge, the crowd stretched out into a grey ribbon. On the river below porous ice floes drifted downstream, another unstoppable mass of grey.
Standing in the middle of the rails at the far end of the bridge was a tall young Yid with the collar of his coat turned up. He had his hands in his pockets and the sullen wind was tousling the black hair on his hatless head.
The men at the front drew closer and the young Yid took his right hand out of his pocket without saying a word. The hand was holding a heavy, black revolver.
The men at the front stopped, but those at the back could not see the revolver; they pressed forward, and the crowd kept moving at the same speed.
Then the dark-haired man fired over their heads. The report boomed hollowly in the clear morning air and the river took it up eagerly, echoing it over and over again: Cra-ack! Cra-ack! Cra-ack!
The crowd stopped.
The dark-haired man still did not speak - his face was serious and still. The black circle of the revolver's muzzle moved lower, staring straight into the eyes of those standing at the front.