There was a magnificent sit-down feast, big enough to satisfy even Russian appetites – grey, black and deep orange caviar, marinated herring, smoked salmon, ham, paté, lobster and cheese. And after these appetisers came the main meal – consommé with mushroom pirozhkies, sturgeon in wine, partridge breasts in cream, thick steaks of meat. Ice-cream in an almost infinite number of flavours was served for desert, as well as pineapples, papaya and mangoes, all fruits which were supposedly unobtainable in Petrograd at the time.
The orchestra was the Mariinsky’s own. I don’t think they’d have slummed it for anyone but Konstantin.
All in all, it was the most splendid ball held in the city since my own wedding. Only the guests were a failure.
Mariamna, predictably, was petulant about it.
“There were far more important people at your ball,” she said.
“Yes, but that was in peace time,” I told her, “and just before the start of the season. Many of the fashionable families aren’t even in Petrograd now.”
I didn’t add that even those who were in the capital had needed to be persuaded to come. This was not, after all, the wedding of a prince, merely the union of the daughter of an obscure provincial nobleman and a common tradesman.
It was not only the guest list which annoyed Mariamna.
“Your gown looks so much better than mine,” she complained as we were dressing.
“We’re about the same size. Take it.”
“But then you’ll only find another one, even better. You have thousands to choose from.” She dropped her head into her hands. “Oh, why am I marrying this thick, coarse, peasant? Why, why, why?”
But she knew very well why she was marrying him. Common prostitutes like the ones Misha visited are not the only women who are forced to sell their bodies.
Mariamna cheered up once the ball begun. It might not be as grand an affair as mine had been, but at least this time she was the centre of attention. And there were some important people around – Prince Yusupov and a smattering of grand dukes.
“She’s not as pretty as you,” Konstantin commented as we watched her waltz across the floor, “but you can tell that she’s your sister.”
Looking at her, I could see that Konstantin was right. Her lips were more inclined to pout, her eyes were a little further apart, there was something of Countess Olga’s sharpness about her, but we were undoubtedly sisters.
Even though I had invited him myself, it was a shock to see Misha leaning against the wall, talking to some of his friends from the Corps of Pages. It was almost as if his presence let my past into the room. I remembered the day he’d taken a beating for me, the afternoon by the river bank when he’d introduced me to lovemaking. There were suddenly butterflies in my stomach and my skin prickled. I didn’t want to talk to him – I never wanted to talk to him again – but we Mayakovskys do not run away from our duty. I forced myself to thread my way around the edge of the dancers to where he was standing.
The young men with him bowed, and at Misha’s signal discreetly withdrew. There seemed to be some truth in the stories Konstantin had heard about him. He was still a young man, scarcely more than a boy, but his face showed all the signs of hard living. I think he was drunk even at that moment.
“It’s good to see you, Anna,” he said.
“It’s good to see you, too,” I replied, not knowing whether I meant it or not.
He reached across and took my hand. “I was a fool to run away from you.”
The baby! He wanted the baby! “You made your choice,” I said shakily, “and now it’s too late. Nicky is legally Konstantin’s son and heir.”
He gazed at me with glassy-eyed incomprehension. “Nicky? Nicky?” He shook his head as if to clear his brain. “Oh, your child! What’s he got to do with anything?”
“I thought you meant … when you said you were a fool to run away—”
“A fool! A complete bloody fool! We’d loved each other so very much, for so long.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “We did.”
“And then I lost my head.”
“I was to blame, too,” I said. I hadn’t known he was my half-brother, that was true, but I’d wanted to make love just as much as he had.
“No, no, you weren’t to blame,” he protested. “You were perfect. It was me. I was trapped by bourgeois morality, and because of that, we’ve wasted years.” He lowered his voice. “I have this room. No one knows about it. We could go there. What marvellous times we could have, Anna.”
I shrank back from him. As I turned to escape, I felt the touch of his hand on my shoulder. And felt something else too – an emotion I thought I’d buried a long time ago.
The hand was still there, pressing down, sapping my strength. I knocked his arm aside and rushed into a gap left by the dancers.
Ashamed and humiliated, I made my way across the ballroom floor, hardly noticing the couples who waltzed gracefully past me. How could I ever let such thoughts enter my mind? How could I have so desperately wanted to say, “Yes, oh yes, let’s go to your secret room! I’ll do anything to recapture that wonderful moment on the river bank – the moment before it all turned sour.”
I was scared. Scared of Misha. Scared of myself. I wanted my husband. I wanted my Konstantin.
He was standing alone, looking so blissfully happy that he didn’t even notice my distress.
“I’ve been talking to the General,” he said. “The orders have come through.”
“Orders? What orders?”
“I’ve been posted to the Front.”
Konstantin at the Front – where thousands were being slaughtered every day! I wanted to beg him not to go – but I knew my man and knew, too, that though he would do almost anything to make me happy, he would not do that.
“Don’t worry, my darling,” he said, noticing the distress I was trying so hard to hide. “I’ll be careful.”
Liar, Konstantin! Bloody, bloody liar!
It was two days after the ball that I met Vyacheslav Molotov in a seedy boarding house in the Vyborg district and told him all about my meeting with Peter.
“So we have a problem,” Molotov said when I’d finished. “What are we going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed.
He had a bright future in front of him, this man. In another few years he would be a very important person in the Party, second only to Stalin. But that was all to come. In 1915 he was still a young man of twenty-five who was just starting to climb.
“We could have this man Peter Nechaev killed,” Molotov continued, “but as there’s probably already a file on you in Okhrana headquarters, that wouldn’t do us a lot of good.” He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “So what I suggest,” blowing out smoke through his nose, “is that you agree to do what he wants, and work for the secret police.”
“Work for them!”
Molotov laughed. “It’s not as outlandish as it sounds. The Okhrana does occasionally arrest our people, but its main concern is to keep tabs on us and to encourage factionalism. And do you know how they try and keep us at each other’s throats?”
“No,” I admitted, feeling like a political infant.
“They infiltrate agents provocateurs into our ranks – we know this for a fact. However, what the Okhrana doesn’t know is that some the agents who they think are working for them against us, are in fact working for us against them.”
“If I’m pretending to spy for them, I’ll have to give them information,” I pointed out.
“Of course.”
“But when they find out it’s false, they’ll know I’m really working for you.”
“Some of it will be false, and some merely misleading – but a great deal of it will be genuine.”
“Why should some of it be genuine?”
“Because they’ll give you intelligence in return, to feed to us. That, too, will be a mixture of the false, the misleading and the genuine. What I’m betting on is that the material they give
us will be better than the stuff we give them.”
“Why should it be?”
“They know the higher you rise in the Party ranks, the more access you’ll have to secrets. And what better way to ensure your promotion than to give you genuine information on their own activities.”
But the reverse of what Molotov said was also true. To get better intelligence from the police, I’d have to prove I was worth it, and I could only do that by passing on better pieces of information about the Bolsheviks. The higher I got in each organization, it seemed to me, the more I would betray them both. I was still very new at this, and my head swam.
“I don’t like it,” I said. “How can I be sure that I’m being of more use to the Revolution than I am to the Okhrana?”
Molotov smiled. “You can’t,” he admitted. “But what you can do is to minimize to your contact the importance of the material he’s handing you, and inflate the value of what you’re passing to him. It’s like a conjuring trick. You must convince him you’ve given him a diamond, when all he really has is a ruby – or perhaps even a glass bead.”
What a talent we Russians have for double-dealing. Is it any wonder we continue to run rings around the Western intelligence services when we can make even a schizophrenic seem single-minded?
“This Nechaev,” Molotov said, “is he, like so many of the decadent people who hold the reins of power, a homosexual?”
I shook my head. “Definitely not.”
“Then perhaps we might exploit that. When the opportunity arises, seduce him.”
“What!”
“Love is blind, Lyudmila – and so is lust. You’re a very beautiful woman. If you can get Nechaev emotionally involved with you, he’ll be more likely to take the information you bring him at face value.”
I was cursed then – I am still cursed – with the ability to imagine things vividly, to see an incident in my mind’s eye as if it were actually happening. Molotov’s words triggered off such a scene at that very moment. Me, lying on a bed. Peter, the muscles in his naked body as hard as the knots on a tree trunk. The heaviness as flesh and bone pressed down on me. His breath on my cheek. His organ, thick and unyielding, ploughing into me.
I could feel pain and anguish, but not my own. Another face drifted into the picture, a face which was thinner, more intense, less primeval, than Peter’s. The face was Sasha’s. A single salt tear escaped from his eye and ran down his cheek, leaving a trail of sadness in its wake.
“I couldn’t do it,” I said.
Molotov stabbed his cigarette angrily into the lid of a tin which served as his ashtray. “Why not?” he demanded. “Has he got the clap? Are you a part-time nun?”
“No.”
“Then there’s nothing stopping you, is there?”
“There are other factors – other people – involved.”
“Other factors! Other people! We’re revolutionaries, Comrade Lyudmila. And we’ll do whatever is necessary for the cause. Some of the information you hand over to the Okhrana will result in men being arrested, imprisoned – even executed. It’s the price they must pay, a sacrifice they must be willing to make. And what am I asking you to do for the Revolution? To die? No! Merely to spread your legs.”
“All right!” I shouted. “All right, you’ve made your point and I’ll do what you ask!”
I bowed my head, ashamed that I had refused his order, ashamed that I was agreeing to carry it out.
Peter stood by the window, a silk dressing gown covering his powerful frame. His body was just the way I had imagined it to be, and he’d taken me in exactly the way I’d known he would – forcefully and masterfully.
He smiled, a crafty, watchful smile, like a wild bear which is happy to have eaten the honey, but now wonders if the bees will fight back. “Why?” he asked me.
“Why what?”
“Why did you let me fuck you? That wasn’t part of the deal.”
I wanted to tell him the truth – wanted him to know that I would never have slept with him if I hadn’t been acting under orders. But then my sacrifice would have been for nothing.
“Does there have to be a reason?” I asked.
“There’s a reason for everything in this life.”
“And what was yours?”
He shrugged. “I never look a gift-horse in the mouth.”
“Couldn’t that be true of me, too?”
“You mean you wanted to fuck me? I wouldn’t have thought I was your type.”
“Didn’t you ever notice how I watched you speaking at the mir?” I asked, working on the principle that the most successful lie is the truth. “I was only a child, but I was drawn to you even then.”
Peter walked over to the bed. He grasped the sheet which was covering me to my chin and slowly pulled it down, revealing first my throat, then my breasts, my stomach, my pubic mound, my legs. His gaze never left me for a second, and I felt more naked than I would ever have thought possible.
“So you really just wanted to fuck me?” he said. “No other reason?”
“Yes,” I replied, gritting my teeth. “I really just wanted to fuck you.”
Peter slipped off the dressing gown and I watched with fascinated horror as his limp penis began to swell. “Well then,” he said, “shall we do it again? Would you like that?”
I nodded.
I felt the bed sag as it took his massive weight, and braced myself. He was my third lover. The first had been Misha, taking me blindly after so many years of waiting. Next came Sasha, passionate and yearning, yet tender and sensitive. And now, finally, there was Peter, who had the morals of a wild beast and a cruel streak which far exceeded anything to found in the animal kingdom.
Of all my lovers until then, he was the least worthy. I would never – never – have chosen him of my own free will. Why then, I asked myself as I gazed at the ceiling, why, oh why, was the brute capable of arousing me to heights of ecstasy I’d never even approached with Sasha or Misha?
Chapter Nineteen
Terry the barman appears in front of me, a bottle of Guinness in one hand, a glass in the other.
“There yer go, me old Princess,” he says. “Get that down you’ll be able to bend girders, won’ja?”
“Mistake!” I tell him.
I’ve already had two, twice my normal quota, and it’s beginning to have an effect.
“What’d ya say, Princess?”
“Mistake. Didn’t order it.”
“I know you didn’t, Princess. Feller in the Public, Jock McBride, bought it for you. Says you used to know his grandad.”
“Would he mean Davy McBride?” I ask.
“Search me, love. Not from round here, is he? Him being Scottish an’ that. There’s the feller.”
He points across the counter to the other bar, where a broad, sandy-faced man is holding up his glass in salute. I raise my glass in return. He looks like Davy, all right – looks like the man I smuggled guns into Spain with. Davy McBride! Another dead lover!
“And listen, love,” Terry says before going back to the bar, “I know you like to take your time, what with being old and everything, but we’re closing soon.”
He indicates the clock on the wall.
“Clock,” my drink-fuddled mind makes me say.
“It never stops ticking, does it, Princess?”
No, it doesn’t. Whether we’re asleep or awake, it never stops, and the years go by. I can’t be over ninety years old – I must only be dreaming that I’ve lived that long.
But I know it’s no dream. The clock’s finger sweeps round, swallowing up the last hours before the men from the Gulag come for me. How much of my time I’ve used up already! How little I have left!
Time was running out for the Romanovs, too, though I am sure they never suspected it. On the 3rd of September, the Tsar and Empress made an appearance in Petrograd to pray for guidance. They visited three different churches and spent several hours on their knees, while I stood a discreet distance away, emanating the sooth
ing, peasant presence which Alexandra imagined I had.
“With God’s help, we have come to a decision,” the Empress told me when they had finished. “Hubby himself will go to the Front and take over as Commander-in-chief.”
“Is that wise, Your Majesty?” I asked, alarmed, because I didn’t want weak, indecisive Nicholas in charge of any army my husband was serving in!
“Why shouldn’t it be wise?” the Empress demanded, sensing criticism.
“He’s … he’s our leader, not a professional soldier.”
“He will not plan campaigns. He will simply serve as an inspiration to his people.
“I’m sure he will,” I said.
As long as Nicholas wasn’t issuing orders which could put Konstantin in danger, he could inspire whoever he liked.
The Empress’s face relaxed into a smile. “Ah, Anna, if only everyone had your solid peasant sense. If only the government ministers thought like you.”
“They’re against His Majesty going?”
“They say he’s needed here. What rubbish! I am perfectly capable of ruling in his place. As long as I have our Dear Friend to guide me, why should they worry?”
She had answered her own question, though she didn’t realize it. The ministers were worried precisely because she had her Dear Friend to guide her.
No sooner had the Tsar set up his headquarters in Mogilev, than Rasputin began his work of dismantling the Government. The Minister of the Interior was a personal enemy and very vocal critic of the starets – he would have to go. The Prime Minister fell next, rapidly followed by the Minister of War and the Foreign Minister. By the time the regime collapsed, eighteen months later, there had been twenty-one changes in Government, and most of the new appointees were Rasputin’s creatures.
“Have you heard about the secret apartment where one of the Minister of the Interior’s flunkeys has meetings with Rasputin?” Peter asked from the other side of the bed.
I rolled over so that I could see him. Massive torso, chest hair almost as thick as a bear’s fur, tight, hard muscles. A body which he treated as a machine to give me a sensual pleasure I had never experienced before, pleasure which I fought – because I hated to receive it from him – but to which I always finally surrendered.
The Silent Land Page 20