His face froze for a second, and I knew I’d hit a sore point. “What background?” he asked, recovering slightly. “My father was a Queen’s Counsel.”
“But what about your grandfather? What was he? A miner? Or a cotton mill worker?”
Beads of sweat were forming on the smooth skin. The eye under the pale brow fluttered as a nervous tic set in. No one else was saying a word. “He … he served LMS Railway in an administrative capacity,” the banker managed to splutter.
“Ah,” I said, “a ticket clerk.”
Suddenly, everyone was talking at once.
The inquest took place after all the guests had gone, me sitting in a chair, Sonia pacing the room.
“We went to a great deal of effort to prepare you for this party, great-grandmother.”
“I know.”
“Charles was very willing to do it because he thought you might … er …”
“Be a social asset?”
“Because he thought that you might enjoy meeting other people, and other people might enjoy meeting you.”
“I did enjoy meeting other people,” I said, thinking of the look on the banker’s face when he realized I’d seen through him.
“There were so many things you could have talked about. The Empress. The balls. Our guests would have found that interesting.”
“That wasn’t my life, not my real one.”
“Well, anyway, there was no reason to insult Roger.”
“Did I insult him? What did I say that was so terribly rude?”
“If he doesn’t want people to know his grandfather was a clerk, then I think we should respect his wishes.”
“He’s sold out his class,” I told her. “It doesn’t do him any harm to be reminded of that now and again.”
“You insulted him,” Sonia persisted, “and he’ll never forgive you for that.”
Nor will you, Sonia.
They both give me a dry peck on the cheek, then sit side by side on the bed. They look uncomfortable there, as though expecting it to collapse at any moment.
“Your social worker rang me today, great-grandmother,” Jennifer says.
“I thought she would.”
“She … she feels you’re finding it difficult to cope on your own.”
“She’s wrong. I’m doing fine.”
Jennifer laughs, and the laugh says, “Aren’t old people funny – the way they pretend!”
“Be honest, great-grandmother,” Sonia tells me. “It can’t be easy. You are over ninety, you know.”
“I led the march from the Volynsky Barracks which toppled the Romanovs,” I say.
Both my great-granddaughters look embarrassed, and for once, I can’t blame them. I am doing what I promised myself I’d never do. I am talking like an old woman, attempting to defend my present with my memories of the past.
“That was all a long time ago, great-grandmother,” Sonia says.
Ah, but that’s the problem, you see. It isn’t a long time ago. It’s as clear as this afternoon, as fresh as if I’d only stopped in at the Vulcan for a bottle of Guinness on my way to the Volynsky Barracks.
Perhaps it is an exaggeration – the false pride of an old woman – to say that I led the march the day after the massacre on Nevsky Prospekt. But I was there. Right at the front. And it was my work, and the work of my fellow agitators – carried on throughout the long night – which had persuaded the Volynskys to mutiny.
They put on a magnificent show, marching in strict military order with the regimental brass band playing them on their way. Soon, our ranks were swollen by thousands of cheering workers, and by the time we reached the centre it would have been obvious even to the Empress – had she been there to see it – that hubby’s reign was all but over.
What sights I saw that day! Men with rifles firing round after meaningless round at the carved heads on public buildings. Workers leaning from the windows of the Okhrana headquarters, throwing out secret files – and people catching the files in midair and tearing them to shreds. Women and children gleefully smashing the windows of police stations and then grinding the broken glass with the heels of their boots until it was little more than powder.
There were other sights, too, sights to chill the blood. I remember the policeman being dragged by an angry mob down to the Fontanka Canal. I think he was a young man, but his face was too much of a mess to know for sure.
“Don’t drown me!” he screamed, blood and terror bubbling on his lips. “I swear to God I did nothing wrong. I didn’t hurt nobody.”
It was hard to condemn his persecutors. They’d suffered under police repression for years, and now they were striking back. Whatever the scared young policeman had screamed in his desperate defence, it was more than possible he’d been involved in incidents in which workers – or their families – had been killed. But guilty or not, it was no way to die.
After my work at the Volynsky Barracks that morning, I knew I was as responsible for the policeman’s death as any of the mob. People always die in revolutions – it’s the price you have to pay for things getting better – and I know that better than most people. But does that mean I am to feel no personal guilt for what happened to that policeman? I’m no Joe Stalin – I can still feel his blood sticking to my hands.
By Monday night the Military Governor of Petrograd had only enough troops left under his command to control the Mariinsky Palace – where the Council of Ministers was meeting – and the telephone exchange. He was almost on the point of collapse, people said later, hands trembling, eyes full of the glazed indifference which comes with true hopelessness.
The Council of Ministers declared a state of siege in his name. A thousand copies of the proclamation were printed, but no one could find either brushes or paste, and in the end they were simply spiked on the iron railings around the Admiralty Building. By morning, they were all lying in the Alexander Gardens, waiting to be trampled under foot. The proclamation, like the Government which had issued it, had no substance behind it to make it stick, and needed only the slightest breeze to become dislodged.
That evening, in his private railway carriage which was stuck in the middle of the countryside by order of the railworkers’ union, the Tsar abdicated. A provisional government was set up, headed by Prince Lvov – though he would soon be replaced by a fiery lawyer called Kerensky – and overnight three hundred years of tradition were discarded. I thought of my Konstantin when I heard the news and for one moment – one brief, mad moment – I was glad that he was dead.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The letter had taken three weeks to reach me, but I supposed I was lucky to receive it at all. I tore open the envelope, my hands trembling, and pulled out the piece of paper inside. It was a drawing of a group of grey, stick-men, walking through the snow towards an izbá.
‘SOLDIERS COMING HOME FROM THE WAR,’ Nicky had written in neat block capitals underneath.
I turned the page over, hoping desperately he’d written something else. He had! There it was, in the corner of paper, almost as if he’d been reluctant to burden me with it.
‘I GO TO PAPAS TOOM EVERY DAY. I MISS YOU MAMA. CAN I COME HOME.’
I felt tears running down my face. But how could he come home, when the situation in the city was so uncertain? And how could I leave Petrograd at that moment? The fall of the Tsar hadn’t solved anything – the war continued, more factories were closing, the bread queues had got no shorter. The liberal Provisional Government argued with the Menshevik-dominated Soviet about who was in control, but in reality, no one was. And we Bolsheviks were doing nothing, just sitting there and waiting for our leaders-in-exile to return. I loved my child deeply, but I couldn’t desert my country.
I picked up my pen, chewed the end of it, and frowned. It is so difficult to communicate to a child with words. How much easier it is to tell him with a hug that you love him, to show him with a smile that he makes the whole world worthwhile.
‘I AM FINE,’ I wrote. ‘I HOPE YOU AR
E BEING A GOOD BOY AND DOING AS VERA TELLS YOU. I LOVE YOU, TOO, AND I HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON.’ I hesitated. Should I write more? I scribbled the next line quickly, before I lost my courage. ‘IN THE AUTUMN, YOU WILL HAVE A NEW BABY BROTHER OR SISTER, BUT YOU MUSTN’T TELL ANYONE. IT’S A SECRET.’
I was crying again, because I’d miss seeing the expression on his face when he read my news. I pictured him in my mind, folding the letter carefully, hiding it in his secret place. And I knew what he’d do next, too. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone,’ I’d written, but there was one person he’d have to confide in. He’d rather die than reveal my secret to another living soul, but he would go straight down the steps to the family vault and talk it over with his father.
Yelaginski Park was as quiet and peaceful as if the Revolution had never happened. I walked by Peter’s side, enjoying the sun, trying not to think about the hold – the holds! – he had over me, knowing that sooner or later I would have to tell him about the baby.
“Lenin will be back within a week,” he said confidently.
“Within a week?” I gasped. “We haven’t been told that.”
Peter chuckled. “You haven’t got my contacts in Germany and Switzerland, have you?”
“Is that why you told me to come here? Because you’ve decided it’s time to join us?”
He shook his head. “You should win in the end. You’re the only party with enough guts to be real bastards. But the bull’s not mounted the cow until he’s got his prick right inside her. So I think I’ll wait a while, just to be sure.”
What a planner he was! Still making a fortune from the factories – somehow, whatever the shortages, raw materials got to him – but constantly scanning the future, calculating what changes could occur, assessing how he could make a profit out of each and every one of them. And yet I don’t think it was the money he lusted after – the game was more important than the gain. He liked being in a situation where not even his survival was guaranteed.
“How long’ve you been wearing that pistol?” he asked casually, though nothing he ever did was casual.
“Ever since the Tsar abdicated.”
“And can you use it? Or is it just there for decoration?”
“Yes, I can use it. The Count taught me how to shoot.”
“Show me,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because it excites me.”
Ashamed as I am of it, the thought of Peter being excited, excited me.
I looked around the park and saw that it was almost deserted. I unstrapped my holster and took out the pistol.
Peter had moved away from me. I raised the gun and pointed it at him. I sighted it on his head, then lowered it until it was aimed at his heart. The man responsible for Sasha’s exile to Siberia, the man who held a threatening Okhrana document over me, was completely in my power.
I felt the trigger against my finger. It would only take a gentle squeeze. At this range, I could not miss.
A move, just one move, and he would have been dead. He didn’t move. Instead, he smiled his broad, confident smile.
I lowered the gun, I can’t explain my reason – I just did it. “What would you like me to shoot?”
He glanced around. “There’s a squirrel in that tree—”
“No! He hasn’t hurt me, I won’t shoot him.”
Peter shrugged his shoulders as if he hadn’t understood. And probably he hadn’t. How could any man who’d turned his workers’ children out onto the street in the middle of November be expected to feel anything for a squirrel?
“What about that branch there?” I suggested, and Peter nodded.
I raised my pistol and took aim. I pulled the trigger, felt the recoil, re-sighted and fired again. When I lowered my weapon, I could see two pale gashes, almost touching, cut into the blackness of the branch. As I watched, the branch swayed, creaked and finally broke in two.
“You are good,” Peter said admiringly. “Bloody good. Let’s go into the bushes.”
“You want to …? Here? It’s too cold.”
“We don’t have to take off all our clothes. I want to screw you, not give you a bath.”
I hesitated.
“You know you want it as much as I do,” Peter urged.
He took my hands and pulled me towards the bushes. I didn’t even try to resist.
Later, when we had both quenched our lust and I hated him again, we walked slowly back to the Rolls-Royce.
“You don’t carry a gun, do you?” I asked.
“No.”
“Because you’re too arrogant to think that you might ever need to use it?”
“When you can see the wolves’ eyes, it’s too late to go running for your izbá.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, if found myself in a position where I needed a gun to defend myself, I’d be as good as fucking dead already,” Peter said. “And if I wanted someone killed, I wouldn’t do it myself.”
“You mean you’d hire an assassin?”
“Maybe,” Peter replied. “Or maybe I could get it done for free.”
The laughter started as a gurgle in his throat, then built up into a fit which gripped him so hard that he had to stop walking.
“Why don’t you let me in on the joke?” I said angrily. “Then I could have a good laugh, too.
“Oh, I’ll let you in on it,” Peter managed to gasp. “I’ll let you in on it, but not yet – not until the time’s right.”
Lenin was coming! Lenin was coming and the streets around the Finland Station that early April evening were crammed with workers and soldiers, waving red banners and shouting out excitedly. Armoured cars moved slowly through the crowd, trams were reduced to a crawl. Lenin, who had not set foot on Russian soil for over ten years, was finally returning from exile.
On the platform, we members of the Bolshevik Welcoming Committee drank in the mob’s enthusiasm until we were almost intoxicated by it. A cheer went up! The train was coming. It chugged into the station, a huge metal monster snorting steam, its single eye bathing the platform in dazzling light. The band struck up the Marseillaise, the monster drew to a halt, a door opened – and there he was!
So many statues of Vladimir Ilyich have been carved since, so many pictures painted, that it is tempting to think of him as huge, a colossus towering above us all. The truth is very different. Standing in the doorway, dressed in an ill-fitting suit, was a dumpy, unprepossessing man with a balding head. Yet he had a determination and epigraph that none of the rest of us could match. He was hard, he was ruthless, totally devoted, totally convinced that he – and only he – was right. I don’t think that Konstantin could ever have liked him, but he wouldn’t have been able to prevent himself admiring the man.
The captain of the Honour Guard of Khronstadt sailors saluted. Lenin looked surprised, almost lost, then he raised his own arm and returned the salute. I’m sure it was the first time he’d made such a gesture in his life!
The Bolshevik Welcoming Committee stepped forward to greet him. “This is Lyudmila,” the man next to him said.
“I’ve heard of you,” Lenin told me. “You’ve done good work.”
You’ve done good work! I used to have a whole drawer full of medals, but none of them ever meant as much to me as those few words. As I stepped aside to allow other party faithful to meet our leader, I was bursting with pride.
The introductions over, Lenin made a speech. The Provisional Government told nothing but lies, he said. What the people wanted was bread, peace and land. Only the Bolsheviks could give these things to them.
He was carried on the shoulders of cheering workers to the armoured car which was to take him to our headquarters. The car made slow progress down Simbirsk Street. Several times, the pressure of the mob forced it to stop altogether, and every time it did, Lenin thundered out his speech again, hammered home his simple message.
Bread-peace-land. Bread-peace-land.
It’s strange, remembering that scene, to think that only a few weeks lat
er the same people who cheered him would be baying for his execution. But that’s the way with revolutions. They rarely move in a straight line, rather they swing back and forth, favouring first one faction then another. And the trick is to hold on, to wait until the pendulum has slowed down and then to plant your feet firmly on the ground and make a grab at it. Which is what Lenin – despite his moments of weakness and self-doubt – finally managed to do.
What giants men were in those days. Not just Lenin, but Trotsky, Konstantin … even Peter. It is hard to believe that they could ever have died, but they did, all of them.
“Dead … all of them dead …”
I’m rambling. I look anxiously across at Sonia and Jennifer, but they’re far too absorbed in their own conversation to have heard me.
“… she thinks that because her father’s a baronet, she can act like God Almighty. But she’s only a prep school teacher – and I told her so!”
“Good for you! And I made it quite clear to her that after all the effort I’d put into the Mothers’ Committee I expected to see Justin play in the Inter-Schools Football Cup – especially if Royalty’s going to be there.”
Ignoring me is nothing new. These visits to their great-grandmother are an opportunity to catch up on gossip and exchange grievances. Besides, their chat helps fill up the awkward silences.
They sense my eyes on them, stop talking to each other and turn their attention to me. “Well, great-grandmother, have you thought about it?” Sonia asks.
“Thought about what?”
“The Home,” Sonia says, pronouncing each syllable slowly, ‘Th-e Ho-me’, as if that will make everything clearer.
“The men in the white coats,” I say, before I can stop myself.
Sonia laughs, condescendingly.
“Whenever we mention the home, you always talk about the men in white coats. Why is that?”
“I’m thinking of hospital orderlies,” I tell her. But I’m not. I’m thinking of the men in white coats who used to stalk the streets of Moscow when all was quiet, all was still. The men whose knock on the door sent fear rushing to the bravest heart.
The Silent Land Page 24