This is important because air is not a normal thing to think. If he had been thinking about something specific (even something trivial—Why is that bubble bluer than the other?) instead of being such an airhead, that thought would have helped him realize that he couldn’t treat the crowd—composed as it was of children, women, laborers, the homeless, and others—like they were organized rebels. Because reliable sources confirm that the tsar gave orders to treat them like rebels. A soap bubble isn’t a rebel, it’s an uncontainable emptiness (though that goes without saying, we’re just trying to shed a little light on the bathing tsar). Because rebels bear arms. Because the leaders of a rebellion are crushed by the powers that be. If the tsar hadn’t been such an airhead, he would have done something to prevent the catastrophe that would lead to his downfall. Which was unthinkable to him, because how could anything bring about the downfall of the tsar himself? The tsar, elevated so far above all others. The tsar, who made a grave error in thinking that the people coming to him for mercy were rebels. They weren’t. Oh, all right, a handful were rebels—Kollontai is a prime example—but the rest weren’t.
The Imperial Guard receives the order to attack the crowd—though not from the tsar; he can’t give orders because he’s covered in a blanket of soap bubbles. His brother may have given the order, but others say it was his uncle, and yet others say no order was given, that the horses’ panic spread from their hooves to the Cossacks’ swords and the infantry’s triggers.
And this panic manifested itself in drawn swords and bullets, or perhaps it was an order to attack—history favors the latter, but it’s such a stupid mistake that common sense favors the former, even if it’s not true—and some say the Cossacks came down the stairs in military formation, their polished boots treading each step in a dance of death. But there weren’t any stairs. Let’s not confuse the issue further.
The news doesn’t spread quickly through the avenues, streets, canals, and rivers of the city, it meanders in a daze, and that’s why most Petersburgians spend the next few hours as if it’s any old Sunday, which would have been the case for Anya, too, if it weren’t for Aleksandra.
27. Back in the Karenin Palace Kitchen
“What I heard was bullets, ma’am. Before the swords, there were bullets. We were two hundred feet from the Narva Triumphal Arch, we could see the river. The soldiers fired three times into the air. The fourth shot was the signal to charge. They kept firing until they were out of ammunition. Then the Cossacks came at us.”
An older man who’s sweating excessively is speaking. His hands are covered in blood, and he has a cut on his cheek that’s barely bleeding, as if it’s in shock too.
Whether it was bullets or steel, there’s a body in front of them wrapped in a cloak, lying on the kitchen table. Blood begins to trickle across the surface, slow and thick. The cloak is the body’s shroud. The dark, slow, lazy blood is its voice.
Young Valeria has already gone to tell lovely Anya, who comes right away, without stockings (she’s still in the process of getting dressed), her bare feet inside boots that don’t match the floor-length skirt she has to hold up with her hands because they can’t find the belt.
“What happened? What’s going on here?”
“The tsar’s men shot at us.”
“Where?” Anya asks.
“We were marching up to the Narva Arch.”
“It was swords, not bullets!”
“It was bullets.”
“They came at us with bullets and swords.”
“Hundreds of people are dead.”
“Volodin fell, I saw him dead, he’s dead.”
“Yes, hundreds died. And even more are wounded.”
“And Aleksandra?” Anya asks.
None of the unexpected guests remembers what the workers were chanting: “Eight hours, Father”—that’s what they call the tsar—“eight hours! We want an eight-hour workday!”
“Answer me! Where is Aleksandra?”
Loyal Kapitonich, the hall porter, rushes in after Mademoiselle Anya (he hates the kitchen, it’s full of things that turn his stomach, especially animal parts, but beets too)—he heard her running down the staircase (the heels on the boots she’s wearing are scandalous), and after looking in the drawing room and the dining room, he’s come to look for her here.
Anya notices the body wrapped on the table. Carefully but decisively she lifts the cloak that covers the bloody form.
Lying there on the kitchen table, they recognize her.
“My Aleksandra? Aleksandra! Aleksandra!”
It’s impossible for Aleksandra to hear Anya, because she is frozen in time, her attention focused on one never-ending moment: The gray faces of the poorly dressed, underfed workers look dead, apart from their eyes, which burn with anger in this ill-fated uprising. Suddenly the battalion of Cossacks charges at us, their swords drawn. I saw them brandishing their swords. One blade slit Volodin’s throat.
The men who carried the body (not Father Gapon’s hired guards, who turned and fled in the stampede without a thought for anyone but themselves, although some say they were martyred by the Cossacks), the ones who risked being trampled by the horses when the infantry moved out of the way, are speaking quietly, transformed by the horror.
Young Valeria is the one who says what everyone else is thinking.
“She’s dying!”
The silence is heavy, like the blood that has begun to drip onto the floor. They peer at Aleksandra’s pale face. For a second she opens her eyes, perhaps just a reflex.
“She’s not breathing!”
“She’s dead!”
Old Kapitonich ages years in an instant, all the years that have been waiting to catch up with him. Suddenly, all at once. No one there realizes it has happened. He still has enough strength to make the necessary arrangements under the circumstances. He goes to the front door and calls, in a decrepit, trembling voice, for Giorgi, who’s two doors down, waiting for a lovely servant in a trance, and asks him to fetch a doctor. When he hears Kapitonich’s voice and sees how he’s standing, Giorgi thinks it’s for Kapitonich himself.
“What’s wrong, Kapitonich?”
“Hurry, Giorgi, Aleksandra is wounded, didn’t you see those men come in?”
“I was over there, waiting for the beautiful Tatiana, I didn’t see anyone. What happened?”
Kapitonich asks him to do two more things: deliver the news to the Karenins and find a shop that’s open to buy the black cloth they’ll need to hang on the front door. Giorgi bursts into tears when he asks for the black cloth, thinking about lovely Aleksandra, then he wipes his eyes and gets onto the carriage, guiding the horses between fits of tears as he howls, “Aleksandra, I delivered you to your death! Aleksandraaa!”
Kapitonich doesn’t hear Giorgi’s lament because he goes back inside the Karenin Palace to find Vladimir. He’s in the servants’ quarters, tinkering with a figure he made out of tiny pieces of wire for his sister. It’s a little man who lifts his hat when you pull a string. Kapitonich delivers the news gently and sincerely enough to keep him from going into hysterics. The figure Vladimir holds in his hands keeps raising his hat as Vladimir sits there, paralyzed. He refuses to see his sister’s body. After a few minutes, he begins to cry. Kapitonich takes the wire figure from his hands and leaves it on Aleksandra’s nightstand. He has to leave Vladimir alone with his tears so he can open the door for the doctor, who has just arrived.
The doctor sees Kapitonich’s face and is the first to realize how much he has aged. But he doesn’t have a chance to ask him why, because Kapitonich guides him to the kitchen, shuffling along like an old man, and leaves him at the open doorway. No explanation is necessary. Aleksandra lies on the table, her blood dripping onto the floor.
At the same time, Piotr comes singing through the street door, but no one hears him.
Kapitonich returns to find Vladimir, but he’s no longer there. He’s slipped out of the Karenin Palace so he doesn’t have to see Aleksandra. Kapitonic
h shuffles back to the kitchen, but his femur and hip don’t cooperate, and the old man falls to the floor like a sack of potatoes. With the little voice he has left, he cries, “Help me! Help!” His arm is shattered, but no one hears his cries of pain because frightened Piotr is singing a funeral song at the top of his lungs.
“May her soul rest in peace.”
The doctor completes the death certificate with the name, date, and cause of death Anya provides. Aleksandra will get a proper burial. He leaves without bidding them goodbye and is halfway home when Giorgi reaches him with the news that Kapitonich has had an accident. The doctor returns to treat him.
Valeria finds the little wire figure. “I don’t know where it came from, but it will be perfect for my Matyushenko when he returns from the bottom of the sea.” Pulling the string of the little doll, watching it lift its hat over and over again, Valeria says, “I hate that damn submarine. I hate that damn submarine.” She puts the wire figure in her trunk.
Vladimir never returns to the Karenin Palace; he doesn’t reply to Anya’s requests to come and collect his sister’s effects. Giorgi can’t find him anywhere. “It’s like Vladimir vanished into thin air.”
28. The Reverend’s Beard
Father Gapon is crushed. When his contingent of demonstrators is attacked and stampeded, he’s saved by the bodies of the wounded and the dead—Volodin being one of these human shields. As he lies there, he says, “There is no tsar, there is no God.” He repeats the phrase two more times, thinking of his Sasha, and says aloud, “Sasha, Sasha,” but no one hears him because they’re all repeating what he’s just said: “There is no tsar, there is no God.”
Rutenberg, his only friend, rescues him and takes him to one of the doorways in the square. There’s no time to lose. Rutenberg has scissors and a blade in his pocket, he becomes an emergency barber, he shaves Gapon clean—farewell, beard; farewell, hair—and his followers scramble for the locks that are falling as if they’re sacred relics. He changes him out of his long robes into the clothes of a regular laborer and takes him to hide in the home of Maxim Gorky, the writer. It’s funny how the heart of Gapon’s movement was made up of all the wretched people living in the Haven, a scene that resembled one out of Gorky’s work, and now he’s ended up seeking refuge from this very author…. But this crazy twist of fate is nothing in comparison to what awaits him, though that’s none of our business for the time being.
PART THREE
KARENINA’S PORTRAIT
Three Months Later
29. Karenina’s Portrait
Sergei has seen Mikhailov’s portrait of Anna Karenina only once. The lighting wasn’t ideal. Sergei was still a boy, despite everyone insisting he was already a man. He was on the way home from school. The Countess Vronskaya sent the portrait at the precise hour she thought Sergei would arrive. She had planned this carefully; it was her revenge against the son of the woman who had ruined her own.
The portrait was borne by one of the countess’s servants—dressed impeccably in French livery—followed by two others, not quite so well dressed (although she was rich, the Countess Vronskaya counted every ruble, her servants lived with their bellies half-empty, and creditors had to call on her three or four times before she would part with a single kopeck). Rich but stingy, she squandered her wealth on frivolities. Such as? A feather from the farthest corner of the universe to replace the one on a hat she despised; Turkish delight from smugglers, which she shared with no one; fine Belgian lace miniatures she caressed with her fingertips before putting them away in drawers to keep them from being ruined; or French bonbons.
The footman in elegant French livery held the portrait of Anna Karenina by its gold-leaf frame, perhaps an excessive impulse of Vronsky’s that, to a finer eye, didn’t complement the delicate color of Anna’s dress. Iridescent feathers for the mother, gaudy gold leaf for the son.
The second servant—in his thick felt shoes, his coarse clothes—carried a woman’s dress in his arms, the only one of Anna’s that the countess had kept (the rest, as previously mentioned, had been donated to a charity next to Olga’s Poorhouse, which helped fallen women, because it pleased the countess to think about floozies wearing them). The third footman—his socks so threadbare it would set your teeth on edge—carried in his right hand the blue box in which Anna had stored her manuscript, and over his left shoulder, a huge, green cloth sack, which contained her collected correspondence and calling cards.
They also delivered a letter from the Countess Vronskaya, a curt, sloppy note to the widower Karenin, saying she would keep Anna Karenina’s jewels for Anya, both the ones he had given her himself and the ones from her son. Karenin understood that these lies were intended only to wound him.
The arrival of the portrait and its entourage at the Karenin Palace had the effect the countess desired, but not in the way she had imagined. Sergei was on his way home. He was returning from school, his eyes glued to the ground. In the morning, walking in the opposite direction, he had almost stepped on a sparrow recently hatched from its shell, its bony body half covered in bluish down, still breathing. The sight frightened and disgusted him. This creature, grayish like a piece of the sky, its beak soft as cartilage, its feet disfigured, looked more like an insect or entrails than a bird. Sergei was afraid of seeing the sparrow again, terrified of stepping on it. That’s why he was scouring the ground anxiously, searching but hoping not to find the little bird. His eyes darted from the ground to his waist and back, a somber zigzag. He looked up when he heard Kapitonich’s voice say, “Heavens!”
It was the third time in a row that Kapitonich had uttered these two syllables. Sergei, absorbed in his search for the harmless creature, staring at the ground, submerging all his worries in this search, anxious but relieved of his other anxieties, didn’t hear him.
He was about to be sent away to boarding school. He was afraid; he didn’t want to go, but he had to, he knew there was no alternative; three nights ago he had wet the bed, which he had never done before, not even when he was really little. Inside him a storm raged, one he couldn’t describe to anyone, not even himself.
And now, on top of that, the unflappable Kapitonich had uttered a worried “Heavens!” like another sparrow falling from its nest, half-formed. Sergei looked up. If it hadn’t been for Kapitonich, the Countess Vronskaya’s servants would have entered the house without Sergei setting eyes on them. But the countess’s plans came to fruition, thanks to Kapitonich’s unwitting aid. That’s how Sergei came face-to-face with this perfect image of Anna Karenina, looking more like herself than she did in real life, her face uncovered, her lovely neck and shoulders partially bared by her Italian dress, her thick, curly, black hair, her eyes, her magnificent mouth expressing intelligence, honesty, passion, her skin like old marble, a color unknown in those climes.
The portrait, the woman, walked along without touching the ground; she didn’t float through the air, because from her waist to the ground, she appeared to wear a pair of trousers belonging to the dark suit of the man who was carrying her. She looked like a huge woman with a short pair of man’s legs. Immobile from the waist up, her legs took nervous steps. The servant was walking like that because of the awkwardness of carrying the portrait and his moral burden, aware of the countess’s wicked intentions to hurt the boy.
Once upon a time, Sergei had played a game pretending to be one person with Marietta (his nanny). They used men’s clothes: a shirt that buttoned from the waist to the neck and a pair of shoes. Sergei wore the shirt back to front, the opening at his back, but he didn’t put his arms in the sleeves; he put his hands in the shoes and used them to lean on a chair.
Marietta hid behind Sergei and put her arms through the shirt. She’d move her arms and he’d move his “feet,” talking and singing. It was hilarious because of the disproportions: Sergei looked like some kind of strange dwarf. Anna split her sides laughing—that’s another thing Tolstoy forgot: Karenina loved to laugh.
The creature formed by the frame
d painting and its bearer appeared to parody the game Sergei played with Marietta, except that it didn’t look like a dwarf: it was his mother from the waist up, larger than life, wearing a pair of tiny trousers. It was grotesque, causing Kapitonich to utter “heavens” and plunging Sergei into pain and horror.
The boy who was ashamed to miss his mother—who nursed the secret of his grief in private, who struggled with both the reality that she was dead and that death would come for him, too, especially if she came for him—was confronted by her in the light of day at the front door of his house. She appeared, her very self (apart from someone else’s legs), the dead become death.
The footman who was carrying her slowed to a stop outside the Karenin Palace and put the portrait down on its side. Anna, floating above the street, as if she were lying down in the boy’s bed to help him go to sleep after reading him a bedtime story. Anna, face-to-face with her son, in broad daylight.
This vision, as Vronskaya had crassly predicted, pierced Sergei’s heart like a poisoned dart. It literally made him sick: he developed a fever much like the one he’d had seventeen months earlier, when Anna had come to visit for his birthday.
On that occasion, when Anna Karenina surprised him, Sergei hadn’t been afraid at all; even if they had told him his mother was dead, he wouldn’t have believed them; he could feel it, he knew it, he was certain that “death doesn’t exist.” That day, his birthday, she was there when he awoke, sitting on the edge of his bed, alive, whole, gazing at him, loving him.
But when her portrait appeared, even if they had tried to hide the fact that she was no longer alive, he would have felt that she was dead, he knew it. In the light of day, against all logic, she had appeared. Luminous, the most beautiful, most perfect—most feared and most desired—of all ghosts, there in front of him, in the street, about to enter his house….
Rescued from obscurity in 1905, Mikhailov’s portrait of Anna is neither the reappearance of a ghost nor the incarnation of death. Claudia looks at it while the servants dust it off and hang it where a landscape used to hang on a wall in Sergei’s office: she’s no expert, but to her it looks like the canvas is the masterwork of some fictional painter.
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