by Fenek Solère
‘A skazka’, Yuri’s eyes glistened. ‘A fairy tale of Moscow!’
Alexei inserted the disc and hit play. For the next two hours the room was filled with skinheads. Their leader, Sasha, known as Blade, was a role model for his young companions. ‘We want to be partisans like Sabine and Luc in France’, Yuri admitted.
‘A regular Bonnie and Clyde’, said Tom, adding, ‘Or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.’ They had never heard of either outlaw duo. It made him feel old. He was wondering if he could ever connect with these people. Sure, they were laughing, but was it with him or at him? He could not tell.
Later, they drank more vodka and talked politics. Yuri was very active in the pagan underground. ‘Vulcari!’ Ekaterina explained. Tom shook his head.
‘What?’
‘Wolf men!’
‘Like Patrol 35 or the Sychev Faction!’ Alexei exclaimed. He pulled out a book entitled The Slavic Gods by Pavel Tulaev, and passed it to Tom, who flipped through the pages, noting the depictions of legendary Rus heroes like Svarovich, Lada, Svarog, and Bereginya surrounded by runic inscriptions. Alexei was a big fan of Repin and explained in great detail the significance of folklore in works like Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom. ‘We are all iazycheskii natsionalizm, like animals and tribal’, he said. ‘It is a great shame that the Orthodox followers of Vladimir toppled the statues of Perun into the Dnieper and raised the holy cross over Kiev.’ Ekaterina, listless but engaged, talked about Masha ‘the scream’, archaeology, and Emelyanov’s paganism.
‘Gladiator!’ Yuri screamed, ‘I have a copy on disc.’ staggering to his bookcase, he waved another DVD in the air. ‘This is great. Did you see the part where the legionnaire’s missile cuts Herman’s head right off?’
After viewing Gladiator, they took him to a shabby tenement on Lesnoy Prospekt to introduce him to Alyosha, the head of the local Vulcari. The White Rex patrol leader stood straight-backed in a Rammstein t-shirt, hand on hip, explaining in clear English that his gym trained street fighters to take on the foreigners who were gaining ascendancy on the streets.
‘Our people are ideologically sound’, Alyosha said matter of factly. ‘Good brains control strong muscle!’
‘And your coaches?’ Tom asked as they entered the fitness room to the sound of Molodyozh Tule.
‘Most are ex-army.’ then, pointing towards a square-shouldered guy in a green vest, ‘Dimitra is currently serving!’
‘Reliable, then?’
‘Very. But we also have international specialists to help us.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, we have a very good guy called Piter Janssen.’
‘I’ve met him. How good is he?’
‘They say he is the best!’
Tom acknowledged a mixed group of trainees, gathering about them. ‘New recruits?’
‘Just last week’, Alyosha confirmed.
‘They look fit’, the Professor mused out loud as his eyes fixed on a girl in khaki shorts and a crop top, pounding a punchbag.
‘Saniya is a Masters student at the Finance and Economics University.’
‘I wouldn’t want to fight her’, Tom breathed.
‘Don’t!’ Alexei warned from behind. ‘She floored me yesterday with one kick!’
Alyosha sat down with his guests under a double-headed eagle flag.
‘The situation here is becoming critical’, he admitted. ‘Survival skills will be vital in the future. The Tajiks, Turkmen, and Uzbeks are everywhere. Muslim gangs run the drugs and the girls. They don’t hesitate to kill and neither should we!’
‘And the military?’
‘Mixed experience’, Alyosha said sardonically. ‘Some, of course, are sympathetic, others, like the cops, can be bought.’
‘But at least political correctness is weak here. You are freer than us to push back.’
‘Yes’, Alyosha laughed. ‘I have seen how your rulers impose laws that mean you cannot fight. It is crazy!’
‘Such pain is self-imposed.’ The Russian shook his head.
‘We will have none of that shit here!’
‘So I see.’
‘Our patrol is very united’, Alyosha insisted. ‘Alexei and Yuri will tell you. Close physical contact creates deep bonds and weapons training builds confidence.’ At that point he slipped an OTS-38 revolver out of his combat trousers and released the safety. ‘We will fight to the finish.’
When Tom returned to the Astoria, a receptionist thrust a bundle of messages into his hands. His telephone was jammed with incoming calls, a little red light winking in the darkness. He bent down to pick up a calling card that had been slipped under his door. It read Tom Hunter RIP.
Sitting on the corner of his bed, he flicked through the concierge’s hand-written notes. One was a coded message from the League of St George in London requesting his immediate return. He knew it must be important so picked up his mobile phone and keyed a response. His head was full of the girl. Her ever-changing expression, the way she paid attention as he spoke.
He kicked off his shoes, pondering the text reply he subsequently received from the UK, lying silent for many hours. Outside, a damask shroud hung over St Isaacs. Glass in hand, he was weighing up his options. Staying and speaking was certainly risky. But it also gave him the chance to make his name. He would also be furthering the Russian cause and show support for the intellects of Evraziiskoe obozrenie. He pondered the odds of him making a difference and why after all these years of emotionless sex this young woman should appear on the scene, just when he needed a clear head? He poured himself another scotch, swirled the ice, and took a deep, satisfying gulp. The hours passed.
A pale sun rose over the eastern shoulder of the Dome, the Cathedral’s heavy head propped on granite forearms. Tom caught hold of the curtains. His mind drifting, he had been dreaming about Yesenin slashing his wrists, composing those last verses in his own blood. The Professor rolled off the bed, wandering into the bathroom. Looking at his face in the mirror, it struck him as particularly vulnerable and forlorn. He was in in need of a strong shot of coffee. Splashing cold water on opaque eyes, he looked over his shoulder, feeling self-disgust at the sight of discarded clothes and soiled tissues strewn on the carpet.
***
Ekaterina woke and almost immediately asked herself why she was so interested in this man? He was not especially good looking, nor rich. Turning over on the pillow she pondered, I am a modern woman, I can do whatever I desire. So what if he was old enough to be her father? What if he was a foreigner? His politics attracted her. His intellect drew her like a moth to the flame.
Leaping out of bed and taking a shower, she looked at her narrow waist and long legs. She touched her breasts and the dark triangle between her legs. His face was in her mind, his aftershave in her nostrils. Afterwards she towelled herself dry, fixed her hair, and pulled on her panties. Standing bare-breasted in front of the mirror, she applied a little make up, not so much that it looked like she was trying, but just enough to add some haphazard elegance. The world around her began to wake. First, the familiar door slammed, then the radio stations broke that morning’s news:
Teip head-hunting clans tighten their grip on the former Soviet-Orient, characterised by patronage and nepotism on a colossal scale;
The rate of extraction of hydrocarbons in Central Asia escalates to feed unprecedented growth in the Chinese economy;
Immigrant shanty towns spring up around Suzdal’s Golden Ring, Kostroma, and Myshkin. The M8 motorway is log-jammed by carts and wagons rolling westwards;
At the Kotorosi River crossing in Yaroslavl Utro Rossii, militants clash with armed immigrants ransacking districts on the east bank;
The Kozelshchina icon is seized and destroyed by as yet unspecified people in Poltava.
Ekaterina fastened her trousers, slid on shoes, stirred and drank instant coffee. She watched as a silver ripple of condensation ran down the window. Outside, birds swooped, flocking to catch the breadcrumbs old Mrs Kozlov cast fro
m her balcony.
Swinging on her coat, Ekaterina made to leave, eager to make their rendezvous at the Blue Bridge. The door rattled in its warped frame. Twisting the key in the latch, a double lock mechanism clicked inside. Then, the sound of her footsteps carried up through the cavernous stairwell, as her shoes tap-danced to the street.
Ten minutes later they were walking over the Sinny Most, making towards the Yusupov Palace, which sat shrouded in spectral mystery on the bank of the Moika. She was thinking that Tom looked great, his face shaved and flinty in the morning light. His body was tall and firm inside his long black coat. There was something unique about him, she thought. Something she could not resist.
They were talking about history and philosophy, arguing over the merits of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Loathing and Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil.
‘It’s good we debate’, she said. ‘It is a sign of a healthy relationship.’ A white coach with Swedish registration plates sat opposite the palace on the rain raddled road.
Starry-eyed with scurrilous rumour, Ekaterina related, ‘The Yusupov’s were one of the richest families in St Petersburg. Felix, Rasputin’s killer was a well-known homosexual. It is said that he was a most beautiful man, married to the Princess Irina, the Tsar’s niece . . .’ She paused, pushing on the door to number 94. ‘He had been to England, educated at Oxford. There were stories that he had won the heart of a Duke’s daughter, but when he returned home there was disapproval of the match with Irina because of his predilections. Being gay was punishable by exile. Some historians even say there may have been strong love feelings between Yusupov and Rasputin.’
‘I thought Rasputin was a ladies’ man?’
A wicked smile passed over her face, reading the signs, checking the entry price. ‘He was, how you say, bi-curious too!’
They bought tickets for 300 roubles, then gathered with some Americans and Scandinavians at the foot of a marble staircase. Chandeliers swung on the roof above as they followed the guide up the red carpet, turning to look back down into the vast lobby.
Professorial in demeanour, with white hair knotted in a tight, spinster-like fist at the back of her small head, the interlocutor struck a pose of relaxed authority, coughing loudly to gain their attention.
‘300,000 people visit the palace every year.’ Her arm extended as if to embrace the entrance. ‘It is renowned for its furnishings, art, and of course the assassination of Father Gregory, more commonly known as Rasputin, confidante of the Tsarina in the last years before the Revolution.’
They were taken through drawing rooms, bedrooms, and a ballroom with shining mirrors and classical motifs. Ekaterina lingered over the pastoral scenes in the glass-plated long gallery, while Tom was captivated by the waxwork representations of the conspirators on that fateful night of December 29. He tried to picture Madeira cakes laced with potassium cyanide. The sound of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ spinning out of the gramophone in a desperate attempt to make it sound like a party was going on in the rooms above. Meanwhile Rasputin, the Starets, was led like Isaac by his father Abraham into the basement room below, ready for slaughter.
Just before eleven, the tourists descended a flight of stairs into a private theatre. The walls were decorated in a sumptuous mixture of orange, white, and gold. On the ceiling was a gaudy fresco, and over Tom’s left shoulder a private box from where the Romanovs and Yusupovs sat in the dying days of the Empire.
Tom looked out onto a derelict garden veiled in smog, a small metal gate lying at the southern entrance. He tried to picture the scene. Rasputin staggering out of a side door, bleeding from a bullet in his chest. His executioners rushing out into the moonlight after him. Revolvers sparking in the dark before a single bullet struck him in the back. Then, the British secret serviceman stepping out of the shadows to deliver the coup de grace at point-blank range.
The guide’s words rang loudly in Tom’s mind. ‘Quoting Gregory Yemfimovich Rasputin’, she declaimed, ‘“If I am killed by common assassins . . . especially peasants, the Tsar and his children would have nothing to fear and would reign for hundreds of years. But if I am murdered by nobles, then none of the Tsar’s children or relations will remain alive for more than two years, they will be killed by the Russian people . . .”’
How prophetic, he thought. Perhaps there was more to this dark force of nature who could cure haemophiliacs and seduce society ladies. The British were right to kill him before he persuaded the Tsarina to advise her husband to withdraw the Imperial forces from the Eastern Front, freeing the Germans to sweep both the French and His Britannic Majesty’s armies into the Channel.
What these conspirators could not have known was the seventy years of Communist rule that would fill the power vacuum, after the bayonets and bullets had done their work in Ekaterinburg. Now that was ironic. In killing off a troublesome priest, they had stirred up a whirlwind that led to Stalin’s purges, mud-filled gulags, and the partition of the European continent.
Tom felt the death shroud fall over his face, smelling burning flesh and tasting the gunpowder caked at the back of his throat.
‘Are you OK?’ Ekaterina asked, bending close to his ear, arm curling affectionately around his shoulder. ‘You look troubled.’
‘I’m fine, can we get a drink somewhere?’ She took his hand and led him down the staircase, out onto the water’s edge. An amplified voice from a tour bus that was driving along the embankment chafed the stillness like an electronic cheese grater. ‘St Petersburg is called the Venice of the north. Home to . . .’ And there the sound trailed out, the back of the bus disappearing behind vaporous curtains of speckled grey.
They were pressed together, arms entwined. Tom let his mind drift. He was telling himself that this could be love, and scorned himself for thinking it. He could not recall being so moved by a woman. That drunken weekend in Singapore with the Aussie radical did not count. He had put that down to the humidity rather than loneliness.
Cars swirled around them as they strolled past a man selling fake Rolex watches from a blanket spread on the side of the road. A doe-eyed bitch snivelled and whelped, rolling onto her back, revealing milky tits to five mewling puppies. Ekaterina bent down to stroke them. The street-seller cornered Tom, opening his coat to reveal contraband Seiko, Hugo Boss, and Cartier.
‘Come on’, Tom said, pulling Ekaterina to her feet, ‘let’s get something to eat. The merchant swore as his dog chased them down the canal bank, barking madly at their heels.
Climbing some steps to a small café, they took seats at a table with a vase of fresh-cut daisies and asters. The waitress smiled indulgently while they studied the menu. Ekaterina ordered a coffee; Tom, a dark beer, before they both decided on ukha, traditional fish soup. He could not be sure what music was playing in the background. Folk music, maybe. He could not tell. There was something familiar about it, a sort of militaristic nostalgia. ‘Of course, Svoi, “Our People”, sung by Lyube’, he mumbled, remembering that the lacklustre middle-of-the road band was the former President’s favourite group.
‘You like?’ she asked, pointing to the brown bottle he raised to his lips.
‘Yeah’, he assured her. ‘It is early for me to start drinking, but I need it.’
‘Problems?’
‘Sort of.’ Then he added, ‘Sometimes people will do anything to stop the truth.’
‘For some people, the truth hurts!’
Tom shrugged. ‘Look, Grigori’s going to raise an army to confront the Bloc.’
‘I have heard the rumours.’
‘Can he do it?’
Ekaterina thought carefully. ‘Yes, there are many sympathisers.’
‘But it will lead to a pitched battle.’
‘It is the natural consequence of what you are doing.’
‘What I’m doing?’
‘Thinkers like you talk. Others fight!’
The EU, UN, and USA declare the exiled Alexander Dugin a public enemy and move to seize any assets he holds in countries wher
e they have legal jurisdiction;
Plans to develop industrial-scale food production in the liberated zones of Ukraine are announced;
The Qahal, the Assembly of God, meet in the reconstituted all-Jewish town of Budaniv on the banks of the Seret River in Ukraine;
All traces of Ruthenian culture are deemed anti-Semitic and draconian sentences are imposed to end politically incorrect activities in the Carpathians.
Stepping out as a dark cowl of cloud slipped over the Cathedral’s cupola, Tom was in an exuberant mood. He was telling Ekaterina about London, his life and work. They turned a blind corner, hurrying back to the Astoria, when by pure chance he caught sight of Arkady’s face in a crowded black limousine on the blue bridge. Revving its engine impatiently, the occupants were locked in earnest debate, deciding who to intimidate next. Tom lowered his voice, raised his collar, and slipped his arm around Ekaterina’s waist, walking on stiffly, turning his head away, trying to blend in with other pedestrians.
Despite his best efforts, Arkady spotted them, lowering the window to shout.
‘English’, he called. ‘English!’
‘Keep walking’, Tom advised.
‘What is it?’ she asked, hearing his name being called, surprised by the force he used to guide her away. Arkady kept calling as Tom led her across the square, twisting his neck just in time to catch sight of shaven-headed Bogdan opening the passenger door, while Arkady sped off, intending to cut them off before they could reach the Astoria.
‘Keep going’, Tom insisted.
‘Where?’
‘Away from the hotel.’
‘What is wrong?’
‘Those people don’t like to hear the truth!’
‘Our truth, you mean?’