“Hurry!”. The postman looking down on him from the basket waved him up.
Sidabras wasted no time. He jumped up and clutched the rope, his ears immediately catching the creaking noise of the turning wheel and the rumbling engine.
The postman manoeuvred the balloon so that it could escape this wicked place and the bullets as quickly as possible.
The head of a Tsar’s soldier was sticking out of the hatch. But by the time the man had clambered onto the roof, the balloon with the Legate dangling down from its rope was already rising up and away from the hospital. The soldier fired a shot, but the bullet merely swished through the air.
Having pulled himself up the rope, Sidabras fell into the basket and was seized by a severe coughing fit, caused by all the fumes.
“Are you all right?” asked the worried pilot in Sidabras’ jacket, which was clearly too roomy for him.
Sidabras nodded.
“Why didn’t you obey my order?” he roared. “I told you to go back to Vilnius.”
It seemed that the postman had his answer ready.
“A Vilnius Post Officer never abandons his own people!”
Antanas Sidabras began to laugh but was immediately seized by a new bout of coughing, and kept wheezing until the ascending mail balloon had freed itself from the stinking clouds of Novovileysk, catching the light of the pleasant evening sun, with the roofs of Vilnius churches glowing in the distance.
Chapter XXII
Vilnius, Afternoon
24 04 1905
The bright purple sky of Vilnius was slowly conquered by the spring dusk. For a while the sun refused to abandon its position in favour of the dull-edged moon, but eventually succumbed, casting a fan of red rays and slowly disappearing behind the horizon. But the city was in no rush to let the descending night in: the darkness was fought by the dancing flames of gas lanterns and ominous orange orifices of factory eyes, by the light flooding through the chinks of inn doors, and open windows of restaurants, beer houses, joy houses, billiard halls and magic lantern shows. The golden light of the new Volta lamps streamed over the gigantic dome of the Exhibition Pavilion in Lukiskes Square, where builders were hurriedly adding the final touches to their, as ever, delayed work. The Navigators’ Tower was doing overtime, as their duty was to direct, stall or hurry the dirigibles suspended in the Vilnius skies. Residents striding along the streets of the city would occasionally stop, throw their heads back and admire the array of dazzling lights in the sky. Quite a few of them could not help but wonder whether a recent rumour about the envoys of the German Kaiser travelling to the Summit in an ultra-modern dirigible – a freshly built flying fortress – was indeed true. While Viscigavas airship port looked like it was consumed by a huge conflagration, the Town Hall was sparing no effort to vie with the port in its decorating activities for the festive occasion.
Tonight free Vilnius had no time for rest.
Following a brief but rowdy day-time demonstration outside the Tower of the Guild of Mechanics, Steam City workers scattered to the local inns. With evening descending over the city, Steam Councillor and head of the Guild of Mechanics Petras Vileisis sat in his office biting his lip anxiously as he went through a manifesto, full of gross mistakes and demands, which he had received from the workers earlier on. Head of the Alchemy Department of University Dominium Jonas Basanavicius had just returned from a Dominium meeting, where he had introduced his audience to the Alchemists’ latest inventions, while Nikodemas Tvardauskis was pottering about in the secret room in his Zverynas house, casting an occasional worried glance at a moving red dot on the blinking map of Vilnius. (The dot – his foster daughter Mila – was now in Bernardine Gardens, where the charmer Columbina, her lashes constantly fluttering, was taking photographs of the moving picture show). Meanwhile, the apprehensive Vilnius Vitamancers were absorbed in a sombre discussion in the Tower of their Markuciai estate.
And so it seemed that the only people in Vilnius putting pleasure before business that night were Edward O’Braitis and Charles Finley – the first and second adjutants of the corvette class dirigible The Star of St George. They sat in the half-empty restaurant of their hotel, drinking beer and playing cards.
In a little Blots hut, cobbler Efraim, a few nails pressed between his lips, was contentedly hammering away, trying to attach the sole back to the shoe of The Truth of Vilnius editor Leib Volynskiy. There was another reason why Leib would turn to Efraim every time his shoes were in need of mending. The naïve, loose-lipped Jew was not at all averse to indulging in leisurely chit-chat and revealing various spicy details, which would later find their way on to the front pages of The Truth, sometimes ruining someone’s life, and sometimes just making it bittersweet. Efraim had once confessed to Leib to being illiterate, and the editor felt rather confident that the old cobbler would never find out about the actual application of his gossip. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help laughing up his sleeve at the thought of what would happen if he did. Every now and then a barefoot boy ran up to Efraim’s hut, whispered something in the cobbler’s ear for a small reward of five kopecks and a few pretzels – originally intended for Efraim’s tea but carelessly lying around for everyone to see – and sprinted away again. Tonight free Vilnius really had no time to put its feet up.
Two people were spending their evening in an unnamed Steam City inn – a man with a beak of a nose and an attractive lady.
“Then we handed him that manu… mani… manifesto. And that was it,” reported Misha Suslov, his hand unconsciously unbuttoning his shirt and sliding under it to scratch his hairy chest. Suslov felt awkward, not being used to receiving orders from a lass. And this was no ordinary lass either.
Beautiful Russian agent Emilia, a slim cigarette holder between her lips – the same one who had shared her bed with the Russian Actual State Councillor Alexander Golytsin – gracefully uncrossed her legs and then re-crossed them in the opposite position, before blowing smoke right into her companion’s face.
“Very good, Mishanya,” she purred with a hint of mockery in her voice. “Where would we be without you? We need to strike while the iron is hot. So tomorrow The Truth of Vilnius... You read The Truth, don’t you? It will contain an article on working people’s demands not being met and the protests that have already commenced. Make sure the message of the free press is not inaccurate. You will have to take care of this tonight. We have to get cracking with the first protest actions in the next couple of days, while on the main day of the Summit the factories will stop working and their workers will flood the streets.” Emilia stared at Suslov’s face. “Who are they protesting against?”
“Against capitalists, exploiters, automatons and industrial machines,” Suslov fired the words back with little hesitation.
With a nod of approval Emilia blew out another cloud of smoke.
“Well done. We will teach them not to wipe their feet on the maltreated working class.”
“So we will,” agreed Suslov, albeit not very confidently. But not because Emilia, dressed in an elegant suit, looked nothing like a representative of the maltreated working class, but because he had still not received the promised reward for his services.
Misha Suslov was just doing his job – having spent long years in various prisons across the Russian Empire for embezzlement and fraud, he had now become a professional instigator and rioter. Having finally realised that his true calling was sparking workers’ dissatisfaction to a degree where it became a blazing riot, this man, fluent in four languages, suddenly found himself in great demand. Although still new to Vilnius and taking great pains to avoid the Legionnaires’ attention, his efforts for the good of Russia were already worthy of applause. But of course, he did not work for free.
Detecting the note of doubt in Suslov’s voice, Emilia made endeavours not to lose his commitment to the cause. She swiftly pulled a thick envelope out of her dainty bag and shoved it into Suslov’s hand under the table. The man lowered his eyes to look inside, and the change in their aspec
t signalled his satisfaction with the contents.
“It’s not for you alone,” warned Emilia, “share it with...” she smiled. “…With the most maltreated ones. Don’t be greedy.” Her last words sounded somewhat harsh, almost like a threat, but before Mishanya could think of something to say, Emilia had gracefully raised herself from the chair and vanished from the inn.
Outside, the lady ascended into a one-horse enclosed carriage and a moment later was rolling down the street. A quarter of an hour later, she slipped inside the Parish Hall adjacent to St Raphael’s Church.
The room was packed with tired-eyed women. Trying to remain unnoticed, Emilia took a seat in one of the last rows and stared at a middle aged woman in a long brown flared skirt and short, racing-green jacket, vehemently gesticulating on the raised platform. In Steam City she went by the name of Jadvyga Zaic.
“And what will happen next?” the woman spoke passionately. “You must have heard about our bread-winners – the men getting ready to strike. But is this what we need? Do our children need this? How are we going to tell our hungry little ones that we have no bread because their dad is not working? Starving children are already filling the many corners of Vilnius. Would anyone like to see their own offspring walking around with his palm outstretched?”
Emilia pursed her lips in annoyance. The over-enthusiastic speaker seemed to be stretching the truth, as it had been years since Vilnius last saw a child who was famished or dying of starvation. Emilia made eye contact with the speaker and shook her head slightly. The speaker understood immediately, and decided to cut right to the real purpose of her speech: “My answer to you is: no, we do not need our men to go on strike. But we, wives and mothers, can also do something to make the rich, stuffed to the gills, stop throwing our empty-pocketed men into the streets. You must have heard that people from all over Europe will be soon coming to Vilnius. We should come together, united in our pursuit of fairness, and march to the Town Hall to make it clear to them that this awful situation cannot continue. Our men must have work, while the least our children must have is bread.”
An uproar broke out immediately. Around a dozen women jumped out of their seats and began to talk over one another as if they were arguing.
“Silence, silence!” the speaker waved her hand, her powerful voice effortlessly resonating over the other ladies’ noise. “I know you are worried. I know you are afraid of the Vilnius Legionnaires – the lapdogs for the foreign bankers – and their Sluskai prison. But just listen to me! Yes, they are mercenaries and yes, they can be cruel, but they are no wild animals! And what will they do once they see the crowds of women pouring into the streets? We are brave and we are righteous. Mothers, lead your children by the hand and take your newborns into your arms, and don’t forget your foster children!” – the speaker turned her eyes to the front row and gestured at the head of the orphanage, Margarita Berg, and several nuns – “and let’s all advance together towards the Town Hall. Forward! Let’s march! If free Vilnius is cruel enough to confront women and mothers down the barrel of a gun, when all they are doing is fighting for fairness, let all of Europe be witness to this. Let’s march!“
Shouts of approval and cheers rippled through the audience. Emilia sent the speaker a nod of approval, and sneaked out of the hall. She would give the speaker her money later.
The third item on the agenda of the Russian spy tonight was slightly further afield. After the carriage had left Steam City, it slowly made its way through the crowds of people strolling leisurely over Green Bridge, observing the workmen erecting tall platforms on either side of the river. They would later be used by the honourable guests of the Summit to watch the daredevil pilot Adam Gaber-Volynskiy fly under the bridge in his Forman IV biplane. Having reached the Old Town, the carriage rolled around Cathedral Square and continued in the direction of St Ann’s Church, then through Mirth City, stretched out on the bank of the Vilnele River to the left.
Beyond it loomed a different Vilnius.
“Oh… it’s the Jewish quarter” – this is what someone without a clear idea of the layout of free Vilnius and their mind stuck in the middle of the last century would say about the Blots. But this person couldn’t be more wrong. Indeed, there were plenty of Jews in the Blots, but they also lived in other parts of Vilnius. The cities of the Alliance, with their freedom and favourable trade conditions, zealously welcomed all newcomers, making them a promised land for Jews from all over Europe.
But not just them. It was becoming home to Hungarians, Armenians, Karaites, Tatars, Turks and even Chinese. They arrived not directly from their respective faraway homelands, but from transit points in Tsarist Russia. With few exceptions they all settled down in the enclosed Blots quarter, where every building incorporated a small manufacturer, an inn or a shop selling all sorts of merchandise. In the narrow streets and alleyways of the Blots, with their multitude of courtyards and secret cellars, and with their wooden bridges swinging in the air and underground tunnels connecting the houses, one could also come across exotic entertainments. The Chinese crammed into stuffy halls to watch cockfights and bet on their favourites, cheering their wins with loud shrieks; the Karaite shops sold the renowned Vendace fish, caught in the lake of Galve; while the inns favoured by the Turks offered the sweet tobacco smoke of the shisha. For those who dared to venture even deeper into the urban labyrinth and managed to create a favourable impression on the suspicious eye regarding them from the other side of the door, there opened up the opportunity to taste opium.
Few strangers had heard of the secret smoking dens adjacent to synagogues or mosques, hidden in the remotest parts of courtyards or forgotten corners, where clients stared into Alchemist opium mirrors and talked to distant lands – enquiring about the health of their uncle Icchak or aunt Ming, or passing important messages to their commander from the intelligence service.
The Blots was a distrustful quarter of modest financial means, living according to its own rules. Jews or Tatars who had put their foot on the first rung of the ladder that led to becoming rich tried to relocate to more prosperous areas of Vilnius, especially after the City Council had rescinded its order banning the Jews from the area between The Gates of Dawn and St Johns’ Church. The fact that they had allowed this inappropriate order to slip through the cracks was now causing them a great deal of shame. But even those Jews who had earned their place in the sun would not sever their ties with the Blots and continued to support its synagogues and yeshivas. It was not by chance that the famous Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem, who had visited Vilnius and the Blots on his way from the opening night of his play in Warsaw, laid his impressions out in one of his short stories called If only I were a Rothschild: “…In the first place, it’ll be guaranteed that a wife always has a three-rouble note with her so she doesn’t have to bother a man when Thursday rolls around… As for my daughters, they’ll all be married off, that’s a load off my shoulders... I’ll be able to teach my students with a clear head. No worries about a livelihood... I’ll pledge a new roof for the old study house – let it stop dripping on the heads of praying Jews... I’ll tear down the poorhouse and establish a hospital – and what a hospital!... with doctors... with chicken soup every day for the sick people. And a chavurah[28] called "Clothing the Poor," so poor children won’t walk around with, I beg your pardon, their belly-buttons hanging out. And a chavurah "Charitable Loans" – so any Jew, whether a melamed[29], or an artisan, or even an ordinary tradesman, can borrow money and not have to pay a percentage and pawn the shirt off his body... And to ensure everything is done correctly, guess what I’ll do? I’ll establish one big chavurah, an Oversight Board, to take care of all the societies, to take care of all the Jews – that is to say, all of Israel, and Jews everywhere will have a livelihood, and live in unity and sit in the yeshiva and study... and from all those schools I’ll create one big academy, in Vilna of course.”[30]
Rumour had it that taking care of the Blots became one of Vilnius Council’s priorities only after
Baron Nathan Rothschild, the unofficial head of the Alliance cities, had laid his hands on the short story.
So it was into this bubbling melting pot that Emilia’s carriage rolled. After pushing its way through masses of people and other carriages, it stopped beside an ugly two-storey building.
A moment later Emilia stepped through a scruffy wooden door, whose disagreeable creak sounded like an annoyed moan about each and every unwanted guest, and entered a small windowless room.
More than a dozen pale women sat at their sewing machines, working the pedal with their foot without ever looking up. The room was packed with seamstresses, their elbows almost touching each other. A stifling stench of sweat lingered in the room, which was never aired. At her work station each worker had a bottle, filled with a cloudy liquid and a glass straw. Every now and then a seamstress would take the straw in her hand, pull it to her mouth and take a sip of the liquid, her eyes still fixed on the needlework. This had an immediate effect – the woman’s eyes livened up, the shoulders went back and the hands started labouring even faster. When the contents of the bottle ran out or when a lady had to go to the bathroom, she pulled a cord hanging beside her, causing a bell in the adjacent room to ring.
The workshop and the room were separated by a disintegrating kersey curtain, which opened up at the sound of the bell to reveal a grumpy fat dwarf with short, unnaturally pumped up arms. As well as serving the seamstresses, it was his task to guard them from prying eyes.
He waited for Emilia by the door. Wordlessly, he took her hat and slipped through the kersey curtain. Emilia followed behind. First, the fat man took her along a narrow hallway, then down the stairs. Reaching a cellar, they stopped in front of a bulky door, and after three knocks on it, she heard the clank of the door bolts being pushed open. The dwarf waited for a moment, then opened the door and gesticulated for Emilia to go in. He, however, stayed in the hallway and sat on a little chair.
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