Zugzwang

by Ronan Bennett

  He waited until Tolya had left. He said, ‘You’re a Jew, yes?’

  In what sense was I a Jew? I was circumcised. I was Bar-Mitzvah. But I spoke no Hebrew and my father had forbidden Yiddish at home. I did not attend synagogue. Rozental I had first glimpsed as a gentile would.

  ‘Why do you hate Russia?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You don’t fool me for a second, Otto. Admit it: you hate our civilisation. You hate our religion and our values. You want to dominate the world and destroy us.’

  ‘That is ridiculous,’ I objected.

  ‘So you’re the exception – a Jew who is a good Russian?’

  My mouth was dry. I was thinking of Gulko and the fate he met on Politseisky Bridge. I said, ‘Are you going to kill me?’

  ‘Otto, Otto,’ he replied, with exaggerated hurt. ‘Why would you think such a thing?’

  I could have pointed to the knife on the desk. I could have repeated the details of Gulko’s murder. I could have asked him if he’d heard the cry Bei zhidov! or the name Mendel Beilis.

  His expression changed, amusement giving way to contempt and spite. He took the knife and stood up, towering over me. I smelled the leather of his coat. I smelled the city street on his workman’s boots, oil and horse dung and cigarettes and dirty snow. He raised the knife.

  I closed my eyes and began to rock slowly back and forth, the way Rozental and the baker and the tailor and the innkeeper would as they contemplated their God. I summoned Catherine before me. I saw her face as I glimpsed it once when she came running through the snowy woods to me, arms outstretched, calling ‘Papa! Papa!’ I was never her favourite. She adored her mother. It had been one of the few occasions when she showed me uninhibited and unconscious affection. She was seven years old. We were in Finland, the three of us, on a skiing holiday. Such joy in her fine-featured little face, such excitement. I thought it the look of a child who felt utterly loved and safe.

  I heard the outer door close softly.

  I opened my eyes. Kavi was gone. His knife was gone.

  For ten minutes or more I could not move, I could not trust my legs to support me or my eyes to guide me.

  I have never been systematic in my note-taking. During analysis I sometimes scribbled the odd word here and there but generally I preferred not to record the session for fear of inhibiting my thought processes and interrupting my responsiveness to the patient. It was my practice to make a full record in the intervals between sessions or at the end of the day. I also made notes on scraps of paper at home, on the tram and in Filippov’s and Café Central. These I gave to Minna who, like all good secretaries, had an instinctive understanding of her employer’s intentions. Her filing system worked perfectly insomuch as she was able to retrieve whatever I needed at a moment’s notice. But it was also highly idiosyncratic; no one else would understand its organising principle, which is why it took me so long to work out which file they had taken.

  What I could not work out was why. What possible interest could Gulko’s assassins have in Avrom Chilowicz Rozental?

  Six

  The doorman smiled ingratiatingly as he let me out of the building. I did not recognise him. A new man, I supposed. He offered to run to the stand to get me a taxi. I had planned to take the tram to the Admiralty and walk to Morskaya Street but, having spent almost two hours sorting out the files, I did not want to be late for my meeting with Anna’s father.

  ‘Where shall I tell the driver his honour is going?’ he asked.

  The question was normal enough and in normal circumstances I would have answered without a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘You’re new here?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, your honour.’

  He was tall and rather thin. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Semevsky, sir. I’ll get his honour’s taxi. Where did his honour say he was going?’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said, walking away.

  It had been clear and cold earlier in the day but snow had been falling since lunchtime. Gas lights flickered through the flurries. As I was about to cross the street, I glanced over my shoulder. Semevsky was still outside the building, watching me. Without looking where I was going, I stepped into the road. A small, dark-blue motor carriage braked sharply, slithering on the street and almost colliding with a droshky.

  I crossed the Nevsky and went to the taxi stand outside the Gostinny Dvor. A driver was waiting for a fare.

  In the back of the taxi I thought about the coincidence of Lychev’s visit and the arrival of Kavi and Tolya. But if they were connected, how? My first instinct had been to summon the police. But until I knew what Lychev wanted I was not certain I could trust the authorities.

  The driver was in a mood to talk. There had been violent collisions that afternoon in the Vyborg quarter between striking factory workers and police, he informed me. ‘All got up by German agents,’ he went on confidently. ‘It’s part of the Kaiser’s plan. He’s trying to ruin our industries and turn the people against the tsar. Then, when he’s got us on our knees, that’s when he’ll invade. The Jews are all in on it, too.’

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t his honour hear the news this afternoon? The police raided apartments all over the city and arrested more than thirty Jews. They found bombs, guns, everything. They were planning to massacre us. Thank God someone is keeping an eye on them.’

  I wondered if Lychev’s visit was in some way connected to the arrests.

  We were passing the Stroganov Palace when I casually turned to look out the back window. My eyes fell on a small motor carriage behind us. Besides the driver I could just make out a passenger in the front. We turned into Morskaya Street. The little car did the same. Was I being followed?

  The taxi driver pulled up at the Imperial Yacht Club. ‘Fifty kopecks,’ he said.

  I kept my eyes fixed on the car behind us. As it overtook us, I saw that it was blue. The same car that had almost hit the droshky near the Gostinny Dvor? I caught a fleeting glimpse of the driver and his companion, but their faces were obscured by their hats. They did not so much as glance in my direction. Perhaps I was being foolish. I was paying the driver when there was a dull boom in the distance. Roosting birds rose up in a sudden squall into the dark sky above. The driver and I looked at each other.

  ‘Sounds like the police didn’t get all the bombers,’ he said.

  I straightened my tie, went to the door and rang the bell. A servant in a dark-green uniform with red piping looked me over.

  ‘I have an appointment with his honour Peter Arseneyevich Zinnurov. I am Dr Otto Spethmann,’ I said.

  Inside, two more similarly attired servants relieved me of my hat and coat and led me up a wide, sweeping staircase. At the top was a plushly carpeted landing. I continued with my escort until we reached the farthest door, which led into a private room. Inside were leather armchairs and a pair of butterfly-backed, cream-coloured sofas in the Italian rustic style. Two potted plants stood on either side of a glass-fronted, mahogany bookcase, and on the French Empire guéridon lay a carefully folded copy of the Petersburg Zeitung.

  One of the servants bade me sit and said that Zinnurov would join me shortly. He offered me a cigar and asked if I would take some refreshment. I asked for coffee.

  The room was terribly overheated. I went to the heavy, dark-green velvet drapes and pulled them aside. There was a good view of the golden caravel of the Admiralty, and Winter Palace Square. The church bells sounded midnight and when the cannon fired it took me a moment to realise it was the routine discharge from the Peter and Paul Fortress and not another explosion.

  I sat down to read the Petersburg Zeitung, a pro-German newspaper I rarely saw. A front-page editorial lauded the tsar’s brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich for his recent speech praising the restraint of the Kaiser and the German people in the face of continued French and English provocations. Germany harboured no animosity towards Russia, the editorial continued, and warned that if the pro
-French cabal in St Petersburg got its way, it would lead the tsar and Russia to ruin.

  For all Anna’s resistance, it was obvious that something traumatic had occurred during her trip with her father to Kazan all those years ago. There was an odious possibility that Zinnurov had made improper advances towards his infatuated thirteen-year-old daughter. For this reason alone, leaving aside his notorious public reputation, my feelings at the prospect of meeting the Mountain were wary and incomplete.

  The man who bounded into the sweltering room and thrust out his hand was tall, trim and straight-backed despite being, by my calculation, almost seventy. His hair was probably thinner than it had been when he was a youth but it was still plentiful, not yet entirely grey, and, for all his hairdresser’s expertise, a little unruly. He spoke loudly; he was used to being heard and appreciated. I imagined he usually overwhelmed his listeners. And why not? He was the Mountain, after all, self-made entrepreneur and confidant of princes. Only the week before the newspapers had reported at length a speech in which he denounced Russia’s enemies as ‘a league of evil’: they included liberals, factory workers, students, artists, social democrats, anarchists, terrorists and ‘a certain race that need not be named because every decent Russian knows who they are’. Was I in his estimation, even if ambiguously in my own, of that certain race?

  A waiter entered with a decanter of red wine and two crystal goblets on a silver tray. The wine was French, Zinnurov informed me with an ironic shrug (the Imperial Yacht Club was famously the resort of the German noblemen known as the Baltic Barons and their friends).

  ‘The French are impossible, don’t you agree?’ Zinnurov said with a smile that was only half playful. ‘The alliance with France is immoral. We should have nothing to do with the French – they are cynical and frivolous.’ He put his nose into the glass and sniffed deeply, then said with a helpless smile, ‘The same, alas, cannot be said of their wine.’

  We toasted each other. The wine was big, earthy and forceful; Zinnurov liked his essence mirrored back to himself.

  ‘I understand from my daughter that you are having some difficulty with the police?’ he said without further formality.

  ‘Earlier this evening and completely out of the blue,’ I began, ‘a police inspector by the name of Lychev visited me in my office. He said he was investigating the murders of the newspaper editor Gulko and a young man called Yastrebov.’

  Zinnurov’s eyes narrowed, his interest piqued.

  ‘I should state unequivocally,’ I said, ‘that I know nothing of these crimes and that nothing of this nature has ever happened to me before.’

  He nodded solemnly. ‘Did you know Gulko?’

  ‘I knew neither victim, though Yastrebov was apparently found in possession of my carte de visite.’

  ‘You did not give it to him?’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘Business cards are often passed on from person to person.’

  ‘I said as much to Lychev. However, he insisted on my attendance tomorrow at police headquarters along with my daughter.’

  ‘Did he say your daughter is suspected in some way?’

  ‘No. Catherine is only eighteen. She is a respectable young woman and it is simply inconceivable that she would know anything about these murders.’

  ‘You’re quite sure about that? With one’s children,’ he said in a rueful, worldly tone, ‘one never quite knows what they get up to.’

  ‘I know my daughter would never get up to murder.’

  He smiled, point taken. ‘Is there anything else?’

  I had already decided not to tell him about the intrusion of Kavi and Tolya and their theft of Rozental’s file. It would give the impression that my affairs must be more complicated than I was letting on and therefore more suspicious.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘except to emphasise again that I am completely unable to help the police in this matter.’

  ‘If you are innocent you have nothing to fear,’ he said.

  ‘Of course this is true,’ I replied. ‘But it is equally true that mistakes are sometimes made. Suspicion can and does on occasion fall on those who are blameless.’

  Zinnurov sipped his drink and lapsed into silence, as if following up some vague line of thought. I could smell the wine’s dense bouquet in the air between us.

  ‘What would you have me do?’ he asked.

  ‘If there was someone in authority to whom you could explain this error, I would be very grateful.’

  Zinnurov clasped his hands together and leaned back in his chair. ‘My daughter says you are an honourable man, Spethmann, and I have no reason to doubt her estimation of you. But my difficulty is that I do not know you. You understand my position? I cannot go to, say, Maklakov, who is the minister of the interior, on behalf of someone for whom I am unable personally to vouch. You could be, for all I know, a Bolshevik or’ – Did I detect a sly look here? – ‘a Bundist. I am sorry, Spethmann,’ he said with a helpless gesture, ‘I never like to disappoint my daughter, but on this occasion I am afraid I simply cannot assist you.’

  I got to my feet. ‘Thank you for finding the time to see me,’ I said formally. I did not feel disappointment, rather distaste – for the man in front of me but also for myself. What had I been thinking in coming here? To this man?

  His smile was equally formal, a slight, quick tightening of the corners of his mouth. We walked to the door.

  ‘How do you know my daughter?’ he asked conversationally.

  ‘I am her doctor.’

  He threw his head back and squinted long-sightedly at me. ‘I thought Dautov was her doctor.’

  ‘I am a neurologist,’ I said, ‘and a psychoanalyst.’

  ‘I see,’ he said uncertainly. His features took on a thoughtful cast. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I may have been hasty.’ He indicated the sofa. ‘Please …’

  Pride and principle dictated I refuse his invitation; my fears for Catherine directed otherwise. I settled in my seat again while he refilled my glass.

  ‘Spethmann?’ he mused aloud. ‘I do not know the name. How long have you lived in St Petersburg?’

  ‘I was born here.’

  ‘Really?’

  The Mountain’s own origins were obscure. It was rumoured his grandfather had been a serf and his father a conscript in the war in the Crimea. What was certain was that all that he possessed, which was a very great deal, he had created for himself. His spectacular rise in the world was the work of an especially powerful personality. Everyone knew how, in the chaotic days following the Revolution of 1905, he made a speech in the first Duma declaring that those who sought to bring down tsarism might just as well try to demolish Mount Narodnaya with wooden spoons and subsequently earned himself his nickname – the Mountain.

  ‘A psychoanalyst, you say? Is something wrong with Anna? Is there some doubt as to her … sanity?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I hastened to assure him. ‘Anna is perfectly sane.’

  ‘It’s the nightmares, isn’t it,’ Zinnurov said, a shrew look coming over him. When I did not answer, he said, ‘Has the numbness also returned?’

  ‘I am not at liberty to discuss my patients’ condition,’ I said.

  ‘Even with a father?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘I hope you understand that Anna is, sadly, a confused and unstable young woman.’

  I said nothing. He stared past me to his own reverie. ‘She was such a beautiful child,’ he said, making his voice nostalgic. ‘Everyone loved her. When a child is happy, completely untroubled by anything in the world, or indeed anything in herself, she is surrounded by a glow. You’re a father, Spethmann. You know what I mean. A real, physical glow that adults can actually see with their eyes. If you could have seen her face then, Spethmann. When you were with Anna you felt as though you were being touched by magic.’

  He paused to draw in a deep breath. ‘Her mother died,’ he said. ‘That was it – the beginning of her troubles.’

  ‘I understood
the nightmares began before her mother’s death?’ I ventured.

  ‘Is that what she says?’

  ‘It is the impression I have received,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he answered firmly. ‘She is either deliberately deceiving you – why, I have not the least idea – or she is genuinely confused and cannot remember. She was sixteen when her mother died and she changed overnight from a carefree child to a troubled young woman with a rather disturbed imagination.’

  ‘I have to say I have never seen evidence of a “disturbed imagination”. ’

  ‘Haven’t you?’ he said. ‘I have.’ He sipped his wine before continuing. ‘And then of course came the marriage. You know her husband?’

  ‘I have met Boris Vasilevich once or twice.’

  Zinnurov shook his head dismissively. ‘An odious little man – vain, pompous, ambitious. A violent temper, too. I could never understand what she saw in him. He’s not exactly handsome either. And there are no children, which says a great deal about a marriage, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Who really knows what goes on between a husband and wife?’ I said blandly.

  ‘Does she tell you what goes on in her marriage?’ When I did not answer, he asked with brutal and surprising directness, ‘Has the marriage been consummated, do you think?’

  He peered at me. Again I said nothing. In our early sessions I had asked Anna, as I would any patient, about the state of her relations with her husband. Her answers had given me no reason to suspect the marriage was white.

  I said, ‘How would you describe your relationship with Anna?’

  Zinnurov gave me a sad, wise smile. ‘I have not seen or heard from my daughter since last September. It is not my choice. I’ve tried to get in touch with her. I’ve tried to get to the bottom of it. When she telephoned this evening I thought it might be because she had forgiven whatever it is I have done wrong. I thought she wanted to see me.’

  He searched my face for sympathetic understanding. I did not have to struggle to convey it. The Mountain I detested, the father was myself.

  ‘Have you any idea why she severed relations with you?’ I asked.