by Ian Hocking
Saskia closed bleeding eyes and said, ‘Robespierre, shoot him. He betrayed me for money. If your principles mean anything, let them lead you now.’ But the effort to speak was too much. She counted her breaths. A few minutes later, she heard the press start up. It would be business as usual while the traitor died.
~
Sleep released her from the tortures of her body. She dreamed that she had fallen upwards into the sky, only to land on its grey membrane and become affixed like an insect stuck to water. The sensation was not unpleasant. She could not see her body, or even be sure that she had a body, but she felt naked.
The sparrows descended.
Yes, she thought. How could I forget about them? This time, when I awake, I will remember them all.
She looked into the uncountable mass of wings, quick eyes, and sharp mouths. She screamed. The birds struck her body like a black waterfall. They pecked at her eyes and the soft flesh between her toes. Their feet scratched. Their wings were unbearable in their fluttering, touching, and though she tried to spit and shake her head, they found her mouth and wriggled inside.
There was no pain.
She remembered the dog that had followed her across the steppe. It had been neither friend nor foe, but a constant companion.
She opened her eyes. The birds poured in. She saw equations and beautiful schematics spelled in fire against her eyelids.
She shouted, ‘I don’t understand,’ and the words were clear, though she knew her mouth to be jammed with struggling sparrows.
The fire became a cloud. It was the distinctive shape of an atomic explosion.
‘You are trying to say something,’ she said. ‘What?’
Mushroom cloud? Is that it?
At once, she understood that the horse radish had contained a deadly fungus called the Destroying Angel.
The Angel of Death.
‘Who are you?’
The sparrows finally tore open the skin of her abdomen. She felt them cram inside. Some beaks snapped up tiny mouthfuls of her blood and spat it into the sky. Others spat new blood. They worked furiously.
~
She awoke in the bedroom. Once more, she felt that something important had been revealed in her dream, but its nature eluded her. The pain returned, along with a creaking sound. She saw that Grisha was tightening a rope around her forearms. The rope was sticky where it met her skin. Something in the poison had made her bleed and keep bleeding.
Saskia looked up and coughed out dried blood.
‘Robespierre,’ she whispered. Her voice was childlike. ‘I will never look at you again as though I am better.’
Grisha settled on his haunches and began to knot the rope. He smiled.
‘My dear, you’re confusing me with—’
Robespierre’s shot passed through Grisha’s chest below his collar bone. He fell against Saskia. He was still holding the rope, and looked from it to Saskia, as though they were pieces in a puzzle. Robespierre struck Grisha’s head with the butt of the gun, lashing left and right, until Grisha was lying alongside her, bloodied and snorting.
‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Don’t kill him. You’ve done enough.’
‘Yes.’ Robespierre looked at the gun and his red hands. ‘You’re right.’
‘How long until the others arrive?’
‘Minutes. That assumes, of course, that Grisha told the truth. Maybe there is no time at all.’
‘Pick up the gun,’ she said. ‘Will the superintendent “hear” the shot?’
‘He is one of us. I don’t know.’ He looked at the weapon. He was weeping. ‘I guess this is the end of me.’
‘Listen, Robespierre. You’re a good man.’
He crouched by her head. ‘It’s almost dawn,’ he said. ‘They are coming for you. People from the south. Georgians.’
‘What about the Milkman?’
‘I don’t know anything about that. Don’t ask me.’ To himself, he said, ‘I stopped him because this is not right. This should not be about money. Perhaps I don’t have the strength for this.’
‘There is nobody else for me in St Petersburg, Robespierre. Do you understand? If you don’t save me now, nobody will.’
He pressed his hand against his temple. The hand still held the gun. Saskia tried to smile.
‘Robespierre, concentrate.’
‘I understand. There are people I know—they are unconnected to the Party.’
‘I need to leave the city before the Georgians come. If Grisha knows, they all know.’
‘Grisha told me you had a rendezvous with someone in the Tsar’s Village.’
‘Concentrate. Untie me. Bring me water and salt. But first look to Grisha. Turn his head so that his airway is open.’
‘Why would you be kind to him?’
‘If you do it, I’m not the one being kind.’
Sleep-sleep-sleep, she thought, recalling a nursery rhyme she had heard in Tiflis. Don’t lie on the edge of the bed or a grey wolf will come and bite you.
~
When Saskia saw daylight through the seams of her moving coach, she was detached from the news that she had survived the night. Her bleeding had reduced but her kidneys felt burned. She knew that her death would now be a slow poisoning of the blood, daylight or no daylight, and it would take more than this continuous, secret tour of the city by closed carriage to save her from the Georgians. Robespierre planned to keep her moving while he searched for what he called a “safe landing”. He had found her bandages, towels to line her underwear, and an infusion of blessed milk thistle, which she sipped as the carriage rocked through street after brightening street. Robespierre would not say how he had acquired these medicaments, beyond a mutter that his father would not miss the money. Saskia called him a gentleman and touched his cheek. He frowned and told her to drink more of the tea.
The hours passed. In the early afternoon, the carriage stopped outside an apartment block near the Griboyedov Canal and Saskia was carried, in blankets, to a wheelchair. Robespierre took her to an apartment occupied by polite, indifferent strangers who appeared to owe Robespierre their help and their silence. The strangers offered Saskia food; she declined. She drank only the infusion. On the hour, she changed her bloodstained clothes for nondescript servant apparel. She was careful not to disturb the black band that she wore above her elbow.
Touching the band, she agitated a memory two years old, perhaps three. She had been standing in a book-lined study near Tiflis, in the Caucasus, when she thought she heard a flock of birds settling in a poplar tree outside the window. It was late in the year for such birds, so she pulled the blind. The tree had been empty.
Robespierre, a stranger himself, abandoned her to the care of these strangers. Saskia could do nothing but sit alone and look into the cup of blessed milk thistle, waiting for the Georgians to break through the door and end everything. During these silences, the strangers read books and played cards.
It was late in the evening when Robespierre returned. He claimed to know a reliable smuggler. Saskia allowed him to make the arrangements. He left to do so. At midnight, a boy interrupted Saskia’s sleep with a note. She frowned at the words. Had something broken inside her? She could not understand them.
Внимание! Что-то случилось. Не ищите меня. »Транспортёра« завербовали. Встретитесь с ним в том месте, в котором Ваш хозяин и я в первый раз встретились. »Транспортер« проводит Вас. Пушкин воспевал »Для берегов отчизны дальной Ты покидала край чужой«. Пусть мои мысли Вас охраняют!
Поспешно я остаюсь
Ваш слуга,
Р.
She closed her eyes, took a breath, held it, and opened them again. There was a sense of something blurred coming into focus.
Alarm! Something has happened. Don’t look for me. The “transporter” is hi
red. Meet him at the place your host and I first met. The “transporter” will take you away. Pushkin sang, “Bound for your far home, you are leaving strange lands”. May my thoughts keep you safe!
In haste, I remain,
your servant,
R.
Saskia stared at the note. Then she bade the boy goodnight and thought about Robespierre and a room in the Great Summer Palace of the Tsars, and home. She slept, and dreamed not of sparrows, but of the Baltic shore and the cinders of amber cast there by the surf.
~
The rendezvous was at Znamenskaya Square, a busy crossing of the Nevsky and Ligovsky Avenues. Here she met her smuggler. He was an Orthodox Jew in his mid-fifties wearing a padded lapserdak jacket. He would not, at first, meet her eye, but he took Saskia’s money, folded it into a small square, and tucked it into his boot. He looked at her chest. She turned away. She did not trust him.
He said, ‘You stink, my dear,’ but Saskia did not reply. If he learned that she had Yiddish, but was a gentile, this would make her an especially memorable character, which she had no wish to be.
The man took her cases. They were not heavy, since they contained only the minimum expected of a woman travelling to see relatives: lacquer boxes, dolls, some books and clothes.
He walked on and Saskia followed, carefully, as though she had gained fifty years in the night. It would be better to hail a carriage but her money would not stretch so far. She scratched her scalp beneath her kerchief and focused on the smuggler’s lapserdak as he walked ahead of her through the gentleman strollers, street stalls, and scuttling children.
The wind came from the true north. Flakes of snow were falling. They settled on her cheap boots. St Petersburg’s green winter was turning white and Saskia might have cried but for the blood in her tears. It would not do to be memorable.
She turned towards the unseen Tsar’s Village. The Amber Room was there. If she had decoded the vibrations of her time band correctly, it was a portal to the future. Her mind stopped once more on the greater question: Who was making the band vibrate? But the countdown had reached zero during the day. The doors of the Amber Room had closed. She did not know when they would open again.
Sleep-sleep-sleep, she thought.
Chapter Five
Switzerland: Spring, 1908
The time traveller had spent winter in a district of Zurich called Aussersihl. Her modest garret was crammed with books, newspapers, unwashed dishes, and a gramophone. Two books were open on music stands: a French volume on methods of cheating at blackjack, and a Russian one on the Great Summer Palace of the Tsars. A chin-up bar had been hammered into the door frame of the bedroom.
The routine of these last weeks had not varied. Saskia would rise around ten or eleven and make coffee, with sugar if she had any. Then she would leave the garret and find her friends, and they would eat lunch. She would return to the garret, read, and meet other friends in the evening. She did not use the name Saskia. She was Godrun Müller, student of agronomy, runaway Bohemian princess to those who cared to ask.
One such was Yusha, a young man with red hair. He was the son of a rich Muscovite and had stopped in Zurich the previous summer on a Grand Tour. After this, he was due to assume the management of his father’s jewellery business, which was second only to Fabergé. Saskia thought him beautiful. In short, there was something of Robespierre about him. She had seen him almost killed in a pointless remonstration with two soldiers. Two of her friends had carried his unconscious body to her garret and laid him out on the bed. Saskia and Yusha had not made love that night, or any night. She had long decided that no man would have this body unless the mind perceiving those heights of sensation was that of Ute.
‘You,’ he had said, when he came around. ‘The woman from the café.’
That was a week ago. This morning, he was still sleeping.
Saskia lifted his arm from her chest and slowly rolled from the bed. Yusha smacked his lips and put his face into the pillow. She smiled at this, then checked his fob watch, which hung on the back of the chair nearest the bed. It was almost seven o’clock. The elderly apothecary downstairs, Herr Trachsel, would be making his coffee by now. The shutters were cut with daylight.
She used the toilet in her bathroom, rubbed water into her eyes, found the toothbrush, pressed this into some tooth powder, and, as she scraped it around her mouth, thought about going home.
Everything depended on her first contact in Zurich, the Count Nakhimov. His villa in Volketswil, not far from her garret, had become a second home for Saskia over the winter. She only visited during darkness and her existence was known only to one servant, Mr Jenner, whom she had never met. Count Nakhimov was a double agent playing with both the Tsarist and revolutionary elements. Saskia did not trust him. But he was straightforward, well connected, and one of the few people in Zurich who could give her background information about the Amber Room in the Great Summer Palace of the Tsars. Besides, he had been recommended.
Saskia returned to the bed and lifted away the blanket. Yusha was not disturbed by the removal. They both slept naked by habit, as the rising heat from the apothecary’s stoves made the garret comfortably warm. Yusha still snored into the pillow. His legs and arms were wide. He looked like a cross-country skier mid-stride.
With a little pressure on his hip, she rolled him onto his back. Still he did not stir. He stopped snoring, took a huge breath, and began to snore again.
Saskia smiled. Carefully, she took his penis in her hand. There was a thought that always occurred to her when she wanted to satisfy Yusha; the thought wounded her because she knew that, if revealed, she would be diminished in his eyes. On the night when Yusha was pushed down steps by the soldiers for chastising their rude treatment of a waitress, one of them had called him a ‘Kleine Hebe’. Little Jew. The term was not muttered. It was as clear as the lusty shout given at the sight of quarry. Many of the other customers had laughed. An otherwise unremarkable husband had turned to his wife and said, ‘Let’s see him buy his way out of this one.’ Saskia had straightened her back and favoured the onlookers with a reptilian stare. Within minutes, she had engineered Yusha’s escape.
She put her lips to his penis and woke him with, ‘Shhhhh.’
‘Morning,’ he whispered, stretching his arms.
‘Morning. Let’s not disturb Herr Trachsel.’
Yusha put his hands behind his head. His fingers messed with his beautiful curls. Saskia remembered the newsreel footage yet to come of bodies being driven into pits by the sweeping white blades of the bulldozers. She tried to suppress this thought by concentrating on Yusha. It almost worked.
~
Two embarrassing encounters with passers-by had been enough to convince Saskia that her habit of running for the sake of it should be indulged in isolation. Only the English gentlemen of the cafés considered it an appropriate form of exercise for a lady, and only then if the lady was a certified eccentric. The other nationalities thought it unhealthy and self-punitive. Here on the mountain, above the snow line, she felt far indeed from punishment. There was an atmospheric emptiness that seemed to draw the sweat off her scalp. Saskia wore her usual outfit of a woollen liberty corset and bloomers. She had tried plimsolls once, but they were too restrictive. Canvas slippers chaffed. Lately, she ran in leather Brogues with soles scored in a cross-hatch for grip.
She leaned into her sprint and placed the ball of each foot in the snow. The crust broke in wet squeaks. She imagined her chest empty on exhalation and full on inhalation. She took these breaths in ratio to her strides and assaulted the slope in fifty-metre pieces. Her route was steep and dangerous. She ran every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
When the wind blew, the trees shuddered and leaned. Birds made black fireworks as she passed.
By late afternoon, she had passed through the deciduous trees to reach the conifers. Her last sprint took her to a high western meadow. The snow was deeper here. It scintillated. Two weaving animal tracks—probably hares—cut
across its centre. Saskia put her hands on her hips and looked at Lake Lucerne. The air was clear enough for its ducks to be visible.
She brushed some snow from a flat rock and placed her rucksack on top of it. Then she undressed and bathed in the snow. She towelled herself and considered the altitude while eating a paste of powdered beef jerky and fat from an old tobacco tin. It would take another four hours to reach her bicycle, which she had left in a shed near Unterägeri.
She changed into her everyday clothes: an ankle-length skirt, boots, a white blouse, and a fur cap given to her by Yusha.
She heard cowbells. Following them down using a frozen stream whose heart had thawed to a vein-blue line, she found a cowherd not more than fifteen years old. He could not speak without shrugging and wobbling his hands in a seesawing motion. He charmed her. Saskia bought some cheese, which she ate while he spoke about a new rifle that his father had given him for Christmas. Ultimately, his voice trailed off. She looked at him, saw the direction of his gaze, and moved her skirt so that it covered her bare calf. The moment reminded her that this period of recuperation was coming to an end. She needed to return to Russia. She needed to go home. She needed to help a friend.
The cows began to walk on. In the pattern of their bells, she discerned a quasi-repeating sequence. The reverse-entropic field of the time band was shaping events in her locality. It gave her the date of 17th May, Julian. Two weeks.
Another pattern, which never changed, spelled:
Das Bernsteinzimmer.
The Amber Room.
~
Saskia reached her home in the quiet minutes after midnight. The steep streets were deserted. Snow had been cleared into dirty heaps at the junctions. She was content. The routine of her life had continued without interruption for many months.
As she cycled around the last corner, whistling a piece by Bach, she happened to look at the high window of her garret. It was unlit. Despite this, she was able to perceive a thermographic impression of a face at the pane. The man standing in the darkness of her room was wearing a hat. Yusha would never wear a hat indoors. She could also see that his skin temperature was unusually high. Perhaps he had just walked up the stairs.