Berezovo Read online

  “Do you recall that young fool, in Tobolsk last year?” he remarked as he offered the tin to the soldier. “Your regiment, if I recall; a captain, same as you. Perhaps you knew him? He looked the other way and let a student escape from custody. He was reduced to the ranks for his pains and sent to a punishment battalion. Not very pleasant, and that was only for a lousy student. Can you imagine what they would do to someone who let one of these bastards escape?”

  Sitting once more opposite him, Steklov eyed the colonel warily. Despite his outwardly calm composure, the colonel’s earlier vehemence had unnerved him. There was something feral about Izorov that told him that he would have readily gone beyond verbal assault if he felt it was necessary. Declining the proffered cigarette, he now attempted to regain some of the ground he had lost.

  “I take your point, Colonel,” he replied, “but I too have my duty. Both to my Tsar and to my regiment. I must ask you, to which regiment does this escort you mentioned belong?”

  “To your own. To the Sibirsky.”

  “Then in law as well as practice, they come under my command. You may do with the prisoners what you will, but I insist that you recognise my responsibility for the troops.”

  Colonel Izorov’s anger seemed to evaporate as rapidly as it had grown.

  “Certainly,” he agreed pleasantly, “I did not intend otherwise. Now, let us get down to practicalities.”

  Picking up one of the sheets of paper from the desk, he passed it across to the captain.

  “These are my notes. Take them and read through them later. As you will see, you will need stabling for about eighty ponies for a period of three weeks to a month. If you don’t have room for all of them at the barracks, Lepishinsky at the Livery stables should be able to help you out. The convoy’s final destination is Obdorskoye, about five hundred versts from here. I’ve calculated that it should take them about a fortnight to get there and slightly less to get back.”

  “So the Mayor will have his deer back after all?”

  “Of course. How else are the troops to return?” replied the colonel with a shrug. “Only a fool would think otherwise. However important these prisoners are, they aren’t worth a company of soldiers freezing their balls off in the snow.”

  “I’m relieved to hear you say that,” said Steklov drily.

  “Another thing,” the colonel went on. “The escort will need two guides who know the way over the ice fields. Do you have two good men you can let them have?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Good. The billeting of the escort I leave to you. Is there anything else?”

  A quick glance at the paper Izorov had given him reminded Steklov of the one remaining obstacle.

  “Yes, just one question. It’s a minor detail really, but it could prove awkward. I have promised Dresnyakov’s drama committee the use of the barracks hall for the night these people arrive. What do you suggest I tell him?”

  “I know all about that,” replied Izorov as he began gathering up the rest of his papers. “I have already cancelled the performance. The last thing I want to do is to hand the Reds a mass meeting as soon as they arrive.”

  “Quite. But would it not be better merely to postpone the play?” suggested Steklov. “Say, just for a week? That way, it might not excite so much gossip in the town. After all, secrecy is vital.”

  Izorov turned the idea over in his mind and gave a slow nod of consent. “Perhaps you are right. I shall leave that up to you.”

  Folding the policeman’s notes, Captain Steklov put them into the pocket of his tunic then got to his feet. The discussion was over. But as he took his carefully polished peaked cap from the hook behind the door, he could not resist a parting shot.

  “In that case, Colonel,” he announced with a faint smile, “I shall inform the drama committee that the postponement is due to regimental exercises.”

  Colonel Izorov looked up sharply, but the young officer was already bowing and making his exit. With a grunt of dismissal, the Chief of Police let him leave. He felt contented with the way the meeting had gone. He had already known that he could rely on Skyralenko to do as he was told, but the alacrity with which the Mayor had surrendered his position once he had been given the opportunity to make one of his speeches had been impressive. And to cap it all, Steklov’s easily ruffled feathers had been smoothed.

  It had been a good morning’s work. He had succeeded in doing what he had set out to do: to give them enough work to keep themselves out of mischief, enabling him to keep his hands free. Now all he had to do was watch and wait. Unless he was very much mistaken, it wouldn’t be long before the first signs of anarchy appeared in the town, like spring grass sprouting through the melting snow. And when they did, he would be ready to pull them out by the roots.

  Chapter Four

  Wednesday 31st January 1907

  Berezovo, Northern Siberia

  At Number 14 Menshikov Street, the chimes of the ancient clock upon her mantelpiece striking the half hour had woken Anastasia Christianovna Wrenskaya to a room ill-prepared for guests. In the dull cheerless gloom of the late afternoon her salon, for so she regarded the faded drawing room, looked as welcoming as a crypt. A gaunt figure, her back unbent despite her great age, Berezovo’s oldest inhabitant sat picking irritably at the folds of the blanket that covered her knees as she waited for her maid to reappear. A lifetime of being waited upon had left her with an ingrained impatience with those in her service. She had neither the strength nor the inclination to go searching for the girl.

  It was at times like this, with her guests due to arrive at any moment and nothing ready for them, that she missed the order and discipline that her first husband – the professor – had once provided. The professor would not have tolerated such dereliction for an instant. At the first sign of laziness or of insolence, he would have given the girl a good hiding. Then what screams and shouts would have come from the back of the house as he pressed home the attack! How they had bellowed! She had often wondered how such small creatures could make such a noise. There had been one chit of a girl who had sounded exactly like the siren at Pilsudsky’s steel mill. The Professor had laughed heartily when she had told him, but it was true. She could recall his voice now, and could remember the way his ticklish moustache would twitch angrily as his temper worsened. Then he would select his favourite stick and, gripping it firmly in his hand, stalk off towards the kitchens to do his duty as Master of the House. The Professor, quite properly, always spared her the burden of witnessing the offender’s punishment. (“It’s a degrading scene, my dear. Best not to look.”) She would sit there, in the same chair in which she now sat, its high-winged back half turned towards the window, and pretend to read as she listened to the commotion.

  From her earliest recollections, Madame Wrenskaya had lived by the dictum that a father’s stinging palm and the policeman’s knout were but one and the same thing and that the Home and the Empire were inextricably linked. The problems facing both were essentially the same; they differed only in magnitude. Both demanded a sense of responsibility in their governance: a level headed acceptance of duty; an unobstructed and purposeful vision of the way ahead. And the two pillars upon which each edifice stood were the same, whether it was a Tsar’s palace or a modest household: the maintenance of order and the application of discipline. To be sure, there were other keystones without which neither estate could hope to prosper: loyalty; solvency; sobriety and, within reason, ambition. But it was those two pillars that between them provided the only sure foundation for public or private life. The erosion of either one would weaken the other.

  Nothing had caused her to change her view. The lower orders were as unruly children; it was simply a matter of keeping them in their place and safe from harm. Just as the country had been ruined by weakness and vacillation among its ruling class, which had in turn given rise to the corrosive nonsense twaddle about ‘rights’, so a household would inevitably founder without a firm hand to control the excess appet
ites of its servants. For proof, one had only to mark the dramatic improvement in the behaviour of their housemaids following a beating. It was true that the girl might be red-faced and sullen for a day but it would be a long time before she was slow to obey her mistress’s commands or neglect her duties around the house. And woe betide her if she had misbehaved herself on a day when the Professor had visited his club in the evening, for then the thrashings were twice as severe.

  Madame Wrenskaya’s bloodless lips twisted into a thin smile at the memory of the Professor’s heavy tread upon the stairs on those nights and the way his large frame had filled the darkness of her bedroom doorway.

  “Vasili,” she would purr. “Dear, dear Vasili. I am afraid you will have to discipline Gaila. Yes, you must! She spilt berry sauce on our second best tablecloth tonight. The stain will never come out. No, Vasili, it must be tonight. I’m sure she did it deliberately.”

  The bed would shift beneath his weight as he sat on its edge and her nostrils quiver as she caught, mixed with the aroma of cognac and cigars, the faint smell of the expensive oil with which he dressed his hair.

  “She’s a bad girl. A wicked girl,” she would whisper insistently and feel the spectre place a moist kiss upon her warm forehead and the bed shift once again as he rose and left her to go in search of his instrument of punishment.

  Her gnarled fingers clenched the blanket draped across her lap as she recalled with pleasure hearing him roar like a lion up the darkened stairwell to the attic, where his unsuspecting victim lay sleeping the sleep of the weary in her rickety trestle cot. And then his footsteps climbing upwards through the house in Moscow, echoing on the uncarpeted boards of the topmost landing until he had finally reached the crude stepladder that led to the servants’ quarters and to the warm smell of startled flesh. Then he was far above her and the door of the attic room was crashing open and she could hear the shouting and the pleading amid the noise of furniture being thrown aside and cheap ornaments breaking as he chased and closed upon his quarry. Often, when they were cornered, they would scream for their mothers; especially the young ones. Either their mother or their father (if they had one) or their God (if they had one). Sometimes, in the last seconds before the beating began, they even called out to her for help, but to no avail. Then came the sounds of descending blows, clearly audible despite the three floors in between. And, after the blows, the mysterious rhythmic creaking of the floorboards punctuated by the girl’s groans and their master’s rough curses; words such as he had never used with her in all the years of their marriage. And long, long after, having washed himself clean, the return of the Professor to her bed where she would allow him to stay until daybreak; listening to the sobbing in the darkness above her, as he slept in her arms; secure in the knowledge that order had been restored.

  “Ah well,” sighed Madame Wrenskaya, wiping the last trace of tears from her eyes, “that was all long ago and best forgotten.”

  The Professor had been dead for over forty years and she had lived on, to be married and widowed a second time and left stranded in this awful town. Ever since the death of the wretch Wrensky, her life had been plagued by one inefficient servant after another, as if the whole class had conspired with the Devil to take its revenge upon her.

  Catching a fleeting glimpse of a lanky figure passing the open doorway, she called out sharply:

  “Mariya!”

  A young woman appeared, anxiously wiping her hands on a grey rag cloth.

  “Yes Ma’am?”

  “There you are at last! Where have you been? I have been calling for you.”

  The maid shrugged. She had heard nothing.

  “I was in the kitchen, Ma’am, plucking a chicken for tonight’s supper.”

  “Stealing the silver, more likely,” snapped the old woman. “Never mind the chicken. My guests will be arriving soon. Light the fire and fetch a chair from the dining room for Madame Tortsova. Go on! Hurry!”

  No sooner had the maid turned to go than Madame Wrenskaya called her back.

  “Have you lit the samovar yet?”

  “Yes Ma’am.”

  “Good! And are the glasses clean this time? Last week, the Mayor’s wife found grease on the rim of hers. I dare say that she is used to that in her own home, but in this house cleanliness is next to godliness. Do you understand?”

  “Yes Ma’am,” replied the girl, her downcast eyes half hidden behind straggling locks of her hair.

  “Now run along, and next time come when I call you!”

  Exhausted by the confrontation, Madame Wrenskaya sat back in her chair. She really was too weary to play hostess that afternoon, she told herself. Still, there it was; it had to be done. Just because one had become old and tired did not mean that one had an excuse to let standards slip. Too many people had done that. She had watched them let themselves go: resign their position in the world; pass their responsibilities onto younger people less capable and less willing to perform their duties.

  At least I have been spared that, she thought. I have no children to disappoint me.

  After two miscarriages, she had not tried again, although the doctors had advised her to. As for the few possessions she had left, she had already decided she would leave what little money she had to the Church when the time came. She had no other living relatives, unless one counted the Professor’s nephews and nieces.

  Where are they now? she wondered. They had to be in their seventies, at least: if they still lived. They would have little need of any bequest she might make. And even if they had, it was neither her fault nor her concern. People should make provision for their old age, as she had done, and not hang around expecting handouts from older relations who had had more foresight.

  No, her mind was made up. All the contents of the house would be taken to Tobolsk and sold. Her lawyers had already received their instructions. She did not intend to give the grubby citizens of Berezovo the pleasure of picking over her bits and pieces. As for the house, it would be sold and the proceeds spent on constructing a new bell-tower for the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She could trust Father Arkady. He understood her motives. She was assuring her place in Heaven not with money – that was too vulgar an idea, if not blasphemous – but with an act of charity that guaranteed the material upkeep of the true religion and the glorification of God. It was a last rebuke against a modern Church tradition that had allowed renegade priests to openly lead processions of godless mobs through the streets of the capital to insult the Tsar. So much Madame Wrenskaya was prepared to acknowledge publicly. In private, she enjoyed the privilege of old age to judge a character by the behaviour of his or her forebears and consequently held the opinion that Tsar Nicholas had too much of his grandfather about him and that he fully deserved the derision of guttersnipes.

  She had seen the old Emperor once at the theatre in St. Petersburg, openly sharing the Imperial box with Princess Yekaterina Dolgorukova, while the poor Tsarina Maria lay ill at the Winter Palace. How old had the Princess been then? Seventeen years old? Eighteen, at a pinch? Old enough to know what a man nearing fifty wanted in exchange for his company, especially if he was Autocrat of All the Russias. To his eternal disgrace he had married her barely a month after the Tsarina’s death, even after he had fathered several bastards by her. Only a man as weak as that could allow himself to be defeated by the English and the French, who were bigger enemies to each other than they were to Russia. Only a man as stupid as he had been could have done what he had done next.

  She had said at the time that the great emancipation was the worst thing that had ever happened to the country. It was tantamount to a shepherd abandoning his flock to roam, believing in the tenderness of wolves. To remove the protection of ownership from what were little more than children; to rewrite the God-given order of society so that those least qualified to cope with liberty had it thrust upon them; and then to give them land as well… Not even Napoleon had been able to deliver such a blow! Inevitably, merely owning land
was not enough: they wanted the best land. In the flames of their former masters’ property, the scum had drunkenly toasted their new found freedom to starve. And since that day there had been no peace in the countryside. From all over the Empire, news had come of massacres in villages and on estates as the situation got out of hand. In the cities murderous assassins stalked the streets hunting down the men born to command, finally destroying – oh, Divine justice! – the Tsar himself with their infernal bombs. For a time, during the reign of his son, the lower orders had been held in check and the Jews and the liberals kept in their place. But now, it was as it had been before, and the lawlessness and the misery of her poor country had increased tenfold since the accession of the weakling Nicholas.

  Madame Wrenskaya comforted herself with the knowledge that she would be spared the final collapse. She would die that summer, or what passed for summer in this dismal town. The Professor had told her so the previous night as she had sobbed out her loneliness to him. This coming summer, he had promised her, at home; peacefully and without pain. And in her gratitude, she had sinned; she had asked him to tell her what Heaven was like. As she had listened, she had recognised, dimly at first and then with increasing clarity, not the shining Kingdom that Father Arkady spoke of but her own grandfather’s estate near Voronezh where she had spent the summers of her childhood. She now wondered whether the vision had been a genuine visitation or merely a dream, and shook her head in sadness. Either way, she was resolved to bear out the last tedious months with a minimum of fuss. She had one important thing left to do, after which she could leave everything in order.

  But before then, she told herself, I have guests to greet and tea to drink.

  Looking about her, she realised that Mariya had followed her instructions to the letter. A fire now burned brightly in the black-leaded grate, and close by her stood one of the hard chairs from the dining room. She could not recall the girl bringing it into the room. Perhaps she had fallen asleep. It was possible.