by Fenek Solère
‘The Alexander column took four years to build. It is made from Karelian granite. The idea was to celebrate Imperial Russia’s victory over Napoleon.’ For a second, the Professor tried to recall how the little Corsican Emperor had marched in ahead of half a million men and crawled out with less than twenty thousand. ‘I came here with thousands of other people to light a candle for Zhirinovsky. My wife did not agree, but I came all the same. You know, before he was assassinated, he said, “Russia once saved the world from the Ottoman Empire by sending its troops to the south. Seven centuries ago we stopped the Mongols. We have saved Europe several times: from the south, from the East, from the north and from the centre of Europe itself. The world should be grateful to Russia for its role as saviour.” He was a great man . . .’ His voice broke off in the dark, his pain palpable, almost as if he was reliving the day when the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia was gunned down in the street. ‘A great, great man . . .’
The whole square was filled with a mournful blue tint. One could imagine the Imperial troops parading before their Tsar, starched epaulettes and sabres shining in thin northern light. ‘Most of the buildings were designed by Rastrelli in the Baroque style. They are large, no?’ Tom nodded silently, overwhelmed by the endless contours of pink and yellow facades as they undulated, curving away in symmetrical lines off the square. To his right, the trees of the Admiralty Gardens stood tall against the buildings, twisting trunks casting fluttering silhouettes beyond the skein of encroaching streetlights that shone like pale torches through green-lime leaves.
They circled the gardens slowly. Tom made out vampiric shapes wandering about under the tree cover. Then, without warning, the BMW pulled over onto leaf-strewn Admiralteyskiy Proezd. He heard the driver open the front door and watched as he got out and walked away from the car. For a moment, the Professor became anxious. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. Was he being set up? Then the footsteps stopped and he saw a cigarette light up. The car doors on either side swung open. Tom looked quickly to his left and right as two girls, one blonde and one brunette, slid across smooth leather. Before he knew what was happening he felt two thin arms wrap around his neck, a hot tongue invade his mouth, and a second pair of eager hands unzip his trousers.
Back in his hotel room, Tom waited a few moments before switching on the light. He was looking down onto the traffic below. The girls stood behind in the shadows, unsure what to expect: tears or passion? Most men could not wait to tear into their flesh, but there were some who snivelled on endlessly about their broken hearts and sad lives. They sensed this client was very different. He was cool and detached, thoughtful and reckless all at the same time. After a while, he went to the minibar and poured them two flutes of champagne and a large tumbler of whisky for himself. He stood looking up at the Cathedral through the huge window, sipping at his scotch, thinking hard, his black jacket cast carelessly over a chair.
They watched him closely, studying his long, slim body set against the illuminated dome. A ballet of stars danced on tip-toe over the frosted cupola. Below, the last trailing troop of revellers were making their way home. They thought his room, all cream-coloured duvets and red headboards, was just like a film set. And they liked making that kind of film. The girls began slipping out of their clothes, pale shoulders and slim-finned swimmer’s hips reflecting in the luminous mirror. One drew an ice cube over her breasts in order to entice him. The other was spooning ice cream from the minibar.
The door to the drinks cabinet was hanging open, almost leering, showing off miniature bottles of vodka and gin. He swirled his glass, listening to chunks of ice clink against crystal. His eyes fixed on the perfect bodies disrobing before him. He felt surprisingly reinvigorated considering that he had been on a non-stop lecturing tour for weeks on end. London to San Francisco, then Vancouver and Quebec. Returning to London temporarily, he had flown on to Bratislava, and now the Baltic. It had become a blur of airport lounges, tubular steel, and tinted perspex. He had been strip-searched and questioned about his baggage and the purpose of his journey by uniformed officials of every colour, height, weight, and sexual orientation.
‘I’m Anna’, the blonde breathed as a beautifully manicured hand tousled his hair. He felt a tongue flick wetly over his stiffening nipples. Simultaneously, pointed breasts pressed into his back.
‘And I’m Oksana . . .’ Arms surrounded him, warm palms caressing his buttocks. He found their voices irresistible as they chattered to each other, occasionally breaking into English, telling him what they were going to do to him, h ow they would make him feel. After a few moments they had removed his shirt and trousers. His watch read 02.15. Their three bodies were framed by the window. The street outside was quiet now, only the night wind walked the pavements and courtyards. Whirling chocolate wrappers darted about the square, scratching pale stone, colliding with railings, catching in the prickling branches stretched out before the vast doors of St Isaac’s Cathedral. There, all alone, a couple stood bathed in wet moonlight. They were talking intently, hands gesturing before they walked on, casting ghostly shadows under the streetlight in the far corner of the square. Her long brown hair flowed over his shoulder.
Tom let the curtain fall on the scene, finished his whisky, and dropped onto the bed beside his two companions. He began to take his pleasure mechanically, gratified by the wet sensations he was feeling and the sucking sounds that filled his ears. His eyes drifted over the room one last time before he switched off the bedside light. His briefcase was open on the table. The laptop’s screen threw a metallic stare at the far wall. Mouths and fingers roamed. The scent of musky orifices filled his nostrils as they all worked towards a simultaneous spasm. Afterwards, slowly but surely, they relaxed into an uneasy sleep, Anna’s head on his chest and Oksana’s bony knee jutting his kidney.
He woke with a telephone ringing near his ear. A thin digital pulse cut the dead black air. Fumbling for the bedside lamp, Tom eventually found the light switch. A woman’s arm lolled over his thigh. His eyes squinted at the alarm clock. It was 03.20. He picked up the receiver.
‘Hello’, he rasped.
‘This is reception’, a woman replied. ‘I have a call for you.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I am sure.’
‘I’m not expecting a call.’
‘They insist, sir!’
‘Ok, put them through’, Tom grumbled, dry-mouthed, failing to mask his frustration.
‘Hello’, came Grigori’s voice down a crackling line. ‘Did you enjoy my little entertainment?’
‘Entertainment?’
‘The girls?’
‘Yes, but how . . .’
‘I arranged with the driver in advance . . .’
‘Well, they are very beautiful . . .’ he went on awkwardly.
‘And friendly, no?’
‘Decidedly!’
‘They are recommended. I wanted to make sure . . .’
‘I’m grateful but also very tired’, Tom hinted.
‘I understand you very well, English’, Grigori guffawed. ‘Listen, I need you to go to the Peter and Paul Fortress tomorrow morning. You will meet one of my people in the tomb of the Tsars.’
‘Who?’ the Professor asked. ‘How will I know him?’
‘It is a woman, Iryna. She will find you. Go there at ten.’ The phone went dead. Tom cradled the receiver and rolled over on the pillow. A face shrouded in blonde hair emerged from the sheets to greet his lips. He heard the sound of a cellophane condom wrap popping.
‘Fuck?’ she asked.
2.
Stand thou, O Peter’s citadel, like Russia steadfast and enduring . . .—Pushkin
The city centre was bathed in storm-blue light. Radiating streets of equidistant nineteenth-century mansions were reflected in dull water. Stern terraces stretched away in austere straight lines as far as the eye could see.
Tom stepped off the kerb, joining the pedestrians moving cautiously to avoid a line of belching
Lada taxis circling the square. To his right, the Cathedral dome was shrouded in cloud; to his left was the overbearing classicism of the Mariinsky Palace. He was pressed by people in long winter coats, jaws set hard against frosty daylight, resenting the imposition of the wage slave culture on the former proletarian people’s utopia.
Stopping for a moment, he watched bandy-legged Asiatics in skin-tight Levis point their cameras at the towering bronze of Nicholas the First, balancing uncomfortably on his galloping steed. The Emperor’s metallic form was slowly disappearing behind the haze falling across the façade of the St Petersburg City Council building.
The Professor’s eyes were drawn to the national flag tugging defiantly in a Baltic breeze. How different from 1917, when an armoured car flying a red pennant stood with its gun trained on St Isaac’s and revolutionary guards wielded bolt-action carbines behind makeshift barricades. The murder and savagery of those days was still etched in the streets. Nobody was immune, no family escaped a visit to the lime pit.
Walking under sparse trees, along yellow gravel paths forming trails beyond the great columned hulk of the Cathedral, he could see the sturdy haunches of the Bronze Horseman galloping towards the oily Bolshaya Neva. The river cut like a roiling charcoal snake between the Admiralty and the University embankments. Tom lingered, staring at the powerful figure set against the steely skyline. The sculptor had spent hours drawing horses in motion before the casting. There was, he thought, a certain irony that this very embodiment of speed and action should be so firmly embedded in solid stone. Yet another one of those contradictions that punctuated his walk along the riverside, where young drunks fell about in alcohol-induced stupors, whilst old men played chess or fished quietly from steps that descended in great waxen slabs to the water’s edge.
Across the river, the palaces, porcelain blue and egg-shell yellow, were being bombarded by streaks of bitter citrus sunlight. The spire of the Peter and Paul fortress was a golden spear, pointing far into the sky beyond the Dvortsovy Most Bridge. He crossed over the Neva with the gargantuan Hermitage Museum looming over his hunched shoulders. Blind windows stared vacantly outward, following his every move. Inside, gigantic rooms filled with amber, gold, and emeralds gathered dust. Endless corridors were stacked with spectacular artwork. Now Tom’s imagination was racing. He was simultaneously scared and excited to see more and more of this fairy tale of obelisks and gemstones, with all its fading grandeur and glistening steeples.
The sea wind picked up when he was midway over the bridge. A passenger ferry passed below, its engine pumping, wafts of burnt diesel pushing up through the blackened metal grating at his feet. Commuters swung briefcases and handbags. He was caught in a maelstrom of flapping ties and flailing scarves. Ahead, he could see a crowd of protesters gathering under the huge phallic columns of the Strelka Vasilevskogo.
Tom let the office workers pass, watching a gap-toothed Nikita Khrushchev lookalike pitch his stall at the base of one of the big rostral columns. The erstwhile tradesman was wearing a shabby army coat and a woollen hat with hammer-and-sickle insignia. The Professor doubted he was a genuine veteran. Stubby, fat fingers tumbled dice. Rouble notes were exchanged across a weather-beaten table. Looking over his left shoulder, back towards the north bank, he caught sight of a huge bear pacing along the wide parapet above the river. A coiled chain dragged uneasily along the ground behind. It stood on stout hind legs, pawing the sky, its dull fur coat matted with a crust of dirt. It had staring onyx eyes, bayonet claws spreading out before its snorting snout.
Tom strolled over the Birzhevoy Most Bridge to the Petrograd side. He pushed against a stream of students rushing to the State University, their lecture rooms clustered in a honeycomb of antique architecture around the Menshikov Palace. Bright, happy faces were wrapped in coloured scarves, bags on shoulders, tossing butts in gutters, splashing through puddles in front of the Pushkin House. They stood in groups, passing iPods or magazines. Some single ones sat on a wall, legs dangling loosely, cat-calling their friends, laughing and jeering. It was a snapshot of European and American cities from the 1950s and ’60s: a homogenous demographic with no compromises to the pretence of multicultural chic. Inspired, the Englishman recalled Francis Parker Yockey’s idea that Bolshevism, once free of the Zionist yoke, could be used as a lever against Pan-Slavic nationalism. He promised to himself that he would re-read the philosopher’s The World in Flames the minute he returned home.
Moving on, he could see the walls of the Peter and Paul fortress in the distance, the edifice scrabbling like a lobster, labouring under the weight of its own shell down to the sandy river bank. It struck him as a sinister presence in the centre of Rastrelli’s neo-classical wedding cake. It was an impenetrable, unfathomable, and infamous geometrical maze at the heart of the city. Its dark vaults were home to the ghosts of generations of revolutionaries who had been hung on meat-hooks for their beliefs.
Crossing the ancient St John’s Bridge under St Peter’s Gate, where a two-headed eagle and a horseman slaying a dragon motif stood proud, he entered into the cold, hard belly of the place. To right and left, carvings of Bellona, goddess of war, and Minerva, goddess of wisdom, confronted him. Directly in front stood the Cathedral, with its vast spire pointing at the gathering clouds. Tom walked in the shadow of Trezzini’s Tower. The wind whipped the walls, rising and falling like a condemned man’s death rattle. The smell of the river was in his nostrils, a fetid infusion of oil on metal. He could almost see the spectral memories of ill-fated dissidents flicker and curve through the grey veil circling about the golden angel one hundred twenty metres above the citadel. The sound of shuffling feet and a sense of awed rapture greeted him as he pushed on a carved wooden door and stepped inside.
It was a magnificent diamante ballroom, covered with iconostasis. Entombed bones in white sarcophagi lay under gold crosses. Small groups of people wandered about, hands clutching guidebooks, eyes lifted toward the artworks. All the Russian emperors had been buried here before the Revolution, their tombs made of Altai jasper and hand-polished rodonite from the distant Ural Mountains. Side galleries were filled with the crypts of princes and royal relatives.
He looked around, hoping to catch someone’s eye. There were no clues in the faces of the people he met who were circling the paintings. In a small room, close to Peter and Catherine’s marble colonnade, where the last of the Romanovs had finally been laid to rest, a tall, thin woman with thick black hair stepped forward and asked his name.
‘Tom Hunter.’
‘I’m Iryna.’ She extended a hand. ‘Grigori informs me that you would like a guided tour of the citadel.’
‘Yes, very much’, he answered.
‘That is good.’ Then, with an expansive gesture, she started. ‘In here are the coffins of Nicholas, Alexander, and their murdered children. Not all of them are accounted for, which gives rise to legends that Anastasia survived the killings in Ekaterinburg.’
‘What do you think happened?’
‘I think she was raped and murdered like her sisters, but they have not yet found the body.’
‘No chance she was smuggled out of the country and her descendants are living in New York, then?’
‘They shot them, stabbed them with bayonets, and then burnt them.’
‘Makes a good story, though.’
‘So does the Loch Ness monster!’
Outside, they walked in the footsteps of hundreds of prisoners. Lichen-covered block fell away into rippling rollers that rushed to lick the feet of the fortress. Above, a smudged Sun reflected off the tall, arched windows cut deep into the high parapet.
‘Originally, the city was to be a naval base and trading centre. Peter the Great had been to Holland and wanted to match the Europeans for military and merchant power. The architecture is English, Italian, French, and Dutch. There is very little Russian style. It was a new beginning. Moscow and Slav fashions were not accepted. Noblemen were told to make their palaces here. There was a decree that nowhere else cou
ld build in stone. All the stonemakers . . .’ She hesitated.
‘Stonemasons’, Tom prompted. Iryna raised a smile at his gentle correction.
‘ . . . stonemasons, came to St Petersburg. The city was planned out like Amsterdam and Venice, geometric and rectilinear. It had been this way in Europe since the Renaissance, but not in the East, which was still twisted and medieval.’
‘And the population in more recent times?’
‘I think one million by the late nineteenth century, and two million by the time of the Revolution.’
‘Much smaller than London.’
‘London’, she radiated. ‘I would love to see Buckingham Palace. You know, I always watch the BBC to see the new baby come home from hospital with Catherine and William?’ The wind picked up, Tom shuddered, and Iryna returned to her narrative. ‘They say that in the first years, the workforce in Peter’s city lost one hundred and fifty thousand lives to disease and exhaustion. Soon they had to bring labourers in from elsewhere to raise the houses. Two to one, or four to one ratios of street width to building height were used to provide balance to the rooftops. There was to be harmony in every design.’
‘Sounds so perfect!’
‘Perfect, no! The Russians were peasant people, close to the land and their animals’, Iryna insisted. ‘Like Lobanov once said, “a nation moved to a city is doomed to extinction”. Peter was trying to make us European before our time!’
‘It seems that in every age there has been an idea that has cost thousands of lives.’
‘We know all about those ideas here. Ideologies come in sachets with breakfast cereals.’ They walked in silence for a few minutes before Tom asked why she was involved in politics. ‘Because I like the music of Alexander Galich, who sang “Petersburg Romance”’: