Widest screen.
= Camera swings to reveal the whole length of the low fence. Beyond it is a drill square. On the square soldiers drilling, with sticks, though, not rifles. Some doing foot drill. Some small-arms drill. With NCOs, no officers. Shoulder a rifle? They don’t even know how to wear a greatcoat, but they’re still soldiers. Drill or no drill, they can’t help noticing, heads swivel this way and that.
= They begin leaving the ragged ranks, moving.
More and more of them come toward us with their sticks. Sticks in hand, just as they were! Sticks, yes! But they’re uniformed soldiers, fit and well fed!
“Dirty cops!”
“Rotten bastards!”
“Workers, don’t give in!”
= The police freeze, swords raised, don’t strike. The inspector scans the scene unhappily.
General view of the drill square.
Hordes of them, hundreds and hundreds, behind the low fence three feet or so high. Some still exercising, some looking our way, some walking over. Their officers have vanished without trace. Just soldiers left, with NCOs like themselves.
= But there’s still the fence. The fence is a barrier between them.
= The policemen are still standing with raised swords. The inspector is all alone. He looks right and left. He is alone, fated to be the Russian state’s one and only defender. The foremost ranks of the workers have begun to melt, to shrink away. A few still stand there, crouched as if stumbling. One young apprentice bends down, down. And wrenches out a cobblestone. Hurls it over the heads of several of his fellows. At the head of a policeman! It strikes home, rocks him on his heels, his sword falls from his hand, his cap falls off, and there is
Blood!
At once the order is given:
“Cutting edge!”
The blows fall!
More blood!
Pan shot.
They’re running! The soldiers! Running toward us! With their sticks!
The whole broad expanse is loud with their whooping.
“Filthy coppers!”
“Get in there, boys! Help your brothers!”
They rush to attack merrily.
The nimblest are over the fence—call that a fence? Jump. Jump. Jump.
Longer shot.
And the other soldiers, up against the fence? They march into it, push against it, all at once.
The fence is down!
We hear it splinter.
The whole fence stretches in length. The army steps merrily over it! Over the flattened fence, carrying those sticks!
Still longer shot.
Back on the square men are still running, more and more of them! You’ll never see such an enthusiastic charge at the front: here nobody is shooting at them, and they know their enemy!
The whole regiment, helter-skelter, upright, brandishing their sticks over their heads!
The broken fence crackles its last under their boots.
The look on the soldiers’ faces is one of reckless devilry. We’re the ones who have power! We don’t have to be afraid!
They run with a will.
“You there, hands off our brothers!”
“Beat the bastard coppers!”
“Hurra-a-a-ah!”
= Some little infantry officer intercepts the attackers, holds up his hand, shouts, tries to stop them. Lots of luck! They don’t listen, the comrades rush onward!
A shot. Another. And another.
= The police squad are retreating, firing to cover their retreat. No “hurrahs” for them, it’s not in their drill book.
= They blaze away regardless, like doomed men: they’re done for, everybody hates them. Now—the rebels are too close to be shot at, all is confusion, it’s too late to wield a sword!
= They’re singled out from the crowd—their greatcoats, tunics, caps make it easy.
The inspector is floored, hit on the head by a brick, vanishes under all those feet.
= They are singled out, their swords taken from them, caps knocked off, revolvers wrested from their hands—may come in handy!
= One turns on his captors—savaged, but still bold. He is struck on the head from behind by an iron bar! Got him!
= The song leader seems to have grown a head higher, and he was lanky enough to start with—no, nobody is that tall—is he on stilts? Now he sings out, straining his lungs, sings fit to burst, for all of them:
“Let us fight the last fight—peace is the prize,
And our children’s happiness, bought with our blood.”
We rise above the crowd.
= Great Sampsonyevsky Prospect. A confused mob, thousands of people. Soldiers embrace workers. Flourish their sticks.
A sort of triumphal procession with raised fists.
The song leader seems to be almost the only one singing.
“And in that bloody dawn shall rise
The sun of justice and of brotherhood.”
Seen as through a narrow tunnel:
= Cavalry—in the distance.
Closer now.
A mounted police patrol.
Closer, larger, widening.
Fifty of them, full gallop, plumed caps, cross-belted, swords drawn!
No flat of the blade from them! They mean to draw blood. And the order has been given.
= But the crowd shows no fear. Men share cigarettes, stand with their arms around each other.
= To one side stand some young men, the sort you see on any street.
Holding bricks, stones, iron bars.
= One busy fellow runs like a madman, holding a burning log, swinging it in a circle.
= The cavalry gallops on, swords drawn.
= The boys wait till they’re close enough, hurl their missiles—we’re in this too! Shower their missiles! And take to their heels!
= The officer is knocked off his horse. Two other men are dazed, trampled.
The charge is checked.
= The madman whirls his burning log, ready to hurl it. The crowd swarms forward, pelting the police with everything, even their sticks!
= Disarray among the mounted police. They turn around.
= The burning brand whirls round and round, giving off smoke, its trail fuses, becomes a fiery circle.
A red wheel.
And that voice sings out again, harsh, earsplitting, inexhaustible, triumphant:
“Let us fight the last fight—peace is the prize
And our children’s happiness, bought with our blood.”
* * *
The monarchic order sails aboard the golden ship of the bourgeoisie over the shoreless ocean of the people’s blood and tears. Smash what little remains of the illusion that the peoples can be freed by the All-Russian despot’s bayonets! To work, comrades! Long live the Great Russian Revolution, the second and the last!
—RSDRP
* * *
[27]
It was not just the revolutionary character of the incident on the Vyborg side that startled Vorotyntsev (though he had not expected such an outburst of anger—yet another reason to hurry up and change the conduct of the war), it was also the reminder that Russia meant 170 million people. The Russian army on the far-off southwestern shoulder of the front, that dense mass of divisions, regiments, people, with happenings and griefs and hopes of their own, was large enough, but here on the other shoulder two thousand versts away, northeast of Petrograd, were other teeming thousands, factory workers and reservists, with griefs and hopes of their own, and the two extremes, unlike in their experience and their feelings, had only one thing in common, that they both belonged to boundless Russia.
This made it all the more important for Vorotyntsev to compare his experience with that of others. Nobody was so omniscient and so all comprehending that he could take it on himself to act for Russia. The evening had given him a lot to think about. His mind was in a ferment.
But as they made their way back to Karavannaya Street, he and Vera saw no trace of disorder or unrest. Petrograd by itself was a
sizable chunk of Russia.
Georgi fell asleep quickly as usual, but, unusually for him, woke up in the night, and from the way he felt, quite soon: our sleeping bodies somehow measure, let us know how long we have been asleep. He awoke with the pleasurable feeling left by a blissful though now forgotten dream: no, it was not a dream, but a pervading sense of good fortune that filled him with joy. It was a long time since he had experienced anything of the kind. The memory of the national calamity had weighed on him in the daytime and in the intervals of sleep. He had slept a troubled sleep at home in Moscow, and again on the train. Why was his whole body now suffused with a sense of purification, so that, rather than sleep, he wanted just to lie there enjoying this happy state?
He turned over other reasons in his mind, trying to delude himself, but no, it was not because he was on leave, not because he was in Petersburg (he didn’t like Petersburg anyway), not because he was staying with his sister and with Nanny, much as he loved them, not even because he had had such an interesting evening—no, the thought seeped into his consciousness: it was because he had met Olda Orestovna.
At the soiree, overcome by happiness, disconcerted by it, he had not had time to wonder, to make sense of it, he had simply been intrigued, delighted that such a clever and well-educated woman showed an interest in him and—on some things—thought as he did.
But now the happiness that welled up in him was like a great sea swell pounding on his chest—and, breasting it, rolling with its surge, he had to confess that it was not the professor’s education that delighted him, but the professor herself, not her clever arguments—if she had spoken stupidly or said just the opposite, it would have made no difference—but the way she uttered them and the look on her face.
Nothing had happened to relieve the general gloom—indeed, the reservists’ mutiny made things look blacker—yet something (what?) had happened at the soiree to ease his mind and cheer him. He had even lost the urge to argue. Lightheartedness had made him a heavy companion: all he could do was gaze—at the neat, dignified turn of a little head, the subtle play of her eyebrows, signaling what she was going to say, the imperious compression of that small mouth. And that endearing gesture—raising cupped hands and stroking one with the other.
Nothing much had happened that evening, they had not even spoken to each other directly, but it was enough to rob him of the wish to sleep. Sleep was impossible with those waves of joy beating on his chest. After such a long time he had almost given up hope of ever feeling happy again, almost forgotten what it was like, but now he was reluctant to go back to sleep and miss those hours of warmth, of light in darkness.
He smoked a cigarette and tried to turn his mind to the things he had heard at the party, but it was hopeless, he kept coming back to her. Meeting such a woman was something he had never expected.
Yet he couldn’t have said what was so unusual about her. She was no conventional beauty, not remarkably graceful or shapely. She talked intelligently, but many others were far from stupid. Was it that she and he thought alike? Not invariably. Sometimes they were diametrically opposed. Was it the way she held herself? Her bearing was unusual in a woman—not pliant and yielding, but upright and sturdy, that of someone sure of her place in the world. Or was it the way she kept glancing at him? There was understanding, recognition, and even unconcealed admiration in her looks, and this alone was enough to make Vorotyntsev feel that he himself was somehow unusual. And her looks said something else, as explicitly as if she had put it into words. Or had he just imagined it?
It was as if something had emanated from her and remained in his possession.
Was it all an illusion? How could he know for sure?
He felt restless in bed. Smoked another cigarette. Suddenly—he knew that he needed that woman! To see her again, talk to her? No, it wasn’t a consultation he wanted—what could she tell him anyway? He simply needed her. With a burning desire.
Strangely, he had nothing to compare this experience with, no way of knowing whether he had misunderstood. Perhaps she had just sympathized with his political views, and he would be making a fool of himself?
But if what he thought he had seen in her eyes really was there he could not leave it at that, could not ignore something so extraordinary.
What should he do, though?
He felt restless, uncomfortably hot. No hope of sleep!
“She’s unmarried, for some reason,” Vera had said.
A foolish, joyous, blazing excitement!
Georgi lay there for hours, not even trying to sleep.
Morning came. Before deciding where to go and how to expend his energy—with so little time for reconnaissance in Petrograd—he made a telephone call as soon as he decently could, and not to Guchkov but to her.
Last night there had been no assumption that he would ring her the following morning. She had given him her number, but for use at some unspecified time during his stay in Petrograd. Standing now before the brown box around the wall phone, Georgi was torn between two anxieties: ringing so soon might be embarrassing, but if he didn’t hurry she could be off to lecture!
She was in! And not a bit surprised. On the telephone her melodious voice was like a love song (or was it just for him she spoke like that?). The telephone seemed to remove all that was merely conversational from her speech and accentuate the musical.
“I’m making use of your number sooner than I expected.”
“I’m very glad.”
He felt drawn toward her through the receiver.
“I somehow feel we didn’t finish our conversation last night.”
“So do I.”
“And since I won’t be in Petersburg long … would you permit me to see you again?”
“Marvelous idea … Come this evening. Come and see how I live.”
Tremendous! How readily she had invited him.
But what about Guchkov? What if Guchkov asked him for that evening?
He held the phone, dreading to hear Guchkov answer promptly, in person, and say, “Come this evening.”
Luckily: “Aleksandr Ivanovich is not yet back in town.”
Anyway, it probably made more sense to see Olda Orestovna first. She had such definite views on everything, and it would be interesting to explore them further.
Meanwhile, he could spend the afternoon delivering his messages to the ministry and the General Staff.
So many, so very many colonels and generals ensconced there, confidently pronouncing on all the things they had never seen for themselves. Long ago, in his youth, Vorotyntsev had aspired to be one of them, but now he felt only revulsion: such posts produced people to fit them.
All day long he carried cocooned within him, hidden from everyone but himself, his secret joy. When evening came he would go to her! How, he wondered, could he have come to Petersburg with no presentiment of such a meeting?
He also had to call in at the Society for the Advancement of Military Science. Their magazine was going to publish an article of his. But that could wait till tomorrow.
A cabby with an officer inside, and a senior officer at that, always goes flat out, without asking whether his fare is really in such a hurry. But Vorotyntsev for once enjoyed the headlong rush. It was last night all over again—the long, open Troitsky Bridge, with pairs of triple lamps at intervals—yet not a bit like last night. Riding so fast that the Rostral Columns spun around the Stock Exchange. There were the towers of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and there was the angel, barely discernible against the dark sky.
Speeding triumphantly along the damp autumn roadways—a hell-for-leather cabby, carrying an apparently self-assured colonel with a neat beard and a tall fur hat at a jaunty angle. Inside, Vorotyntsev felt not at all sure of himself. His confidence had sagged since morning. Perhaps he was in danger of confusing Olda Orestovna’s friendliness and his own liking for her with … something else.
The Kamennoostrovsky Prospect again, near Shingarev’s apartment. All through the day he hadn’t once t
hought about it, but there obviously was no revolution in Petrograd. Nothing revolutionary had happened. This elegant avenue led to the places of entertainment on the islands. There was the traffic circle at the junction with Ruzheinaya—people said it looked quite Scandinavian.
If he made no move at all he would not go wrong. But he was already in a fever of impatience, and the days were slipping through his fingers. How many such meetings could you expect in one lifetime? One? Two? Perhaps none at all.
There was a bizarre black-and-white house, with turrets, on the corner of Arkhiereiskaya Street. Not there in his time as far as he remembered. There was so much modern construction around now, not a bit like classical Petersburg.
In the daytime you saw the queues, noticed the shortages, but by evening everything was made beautiful by electricity—cinemas, cafés, shop windows with fruit and flowers.
It no longer irritated him, as it had the day before.
He hopped out—bought a bunch of mauve asters. Sped on.
The Sports Palace. The residence of the Emir of Bukhara. Silin Bridge.
But was what he was doing permissible? Such a crude frontal approach to a generally respected woman, on the strength of a few intercepted glances and what he imagined he saw in them? No, it was quite impermissible. All the dictates of etiquette and custom barred the way.
Beyond Karpovka stood a detached house built to resemble an Italian villa. The farther they drove, the denser the lining of trees along the avenue. At Lopukhinskaya there were poplars. What a lovely spot she lived in.
The race there, and the thought that they would be meeting any moment now, exhilarated him.
They turned off along the Pesochnaya Embankment. To the right—the dark brown almost black water of the Little Neva, to the left mansions, villas, lights in the depths of orchards. And there it was—a modest gray house with pebble-dash walls (also fashionable) and “1914” over the entrance. So much had been built in the late prewar years! But for the war just think where we could be now!
Outside it was unremarkable enough, but the interior was something out of the ordinary. There was no stairwell, but instead a rotunda, with a staircase spiraling around the wall. The apartments opened onto a circular landing on the second floor.
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