The Man from St. Petersburg (4 page)

Now, watching the English farms come to life in the early morning, he recalled dawn in his home village—a gray, boiling sky and a bitter wind; a frozen swampy field with puddles of ice and tufts of coarse grass rimed with frost; himself in a worn canvas smock, his feet already numb in felt shoes and clogs; his father striding along beside him, wearing the threadbare robes of an impoverished country priest, arguing that God was good. His father had loved the Russian people because God loved them. It had always been perfectly obvious to Feliks that God hated the people, for he treated them so cruelly.

That discussion had been the start of a long journey, a journey which had taken Feliks from Christianity through socialism to anarchist terror, from Tambov province through St. Petersburg and Siberia to Geneva. And in Geneva he had made the decision which brought him to England. He recalled the meeting. He had almost missed it …

He almost missed the meeting. He had been to Krakow, to negotiate with the Polish Jews who smuggled the magazine
Mutiny
across the border into Russia. He arrived in Geneva after dark and went straight to Ulrich’s tiny back-street printing shop. The editorial committee was in session—four men and two girls, gathered around a candle, in the rear of the shop behind the gleaming press, breathing the smells of newsprint and oiled machinery, planning the Russian Revolution.

Ulrich brought Feliks up to date on the discussion. He had seen Josef, a spy for the Okhrana, the Russian secret police. Josef secretly sympathized with the revolutionaries and gave the Okhrana false information for their money. Sometimes the anarchists would give him true but harmless tidbits, and in return Josef warned them of Okhrana activities.

This time Josef’s news had been sensational. “The Czar wants a military alliance with England,” Ulrich told Feliks. “He is sending Prince Orlov to London to negotiate. The Okhrana know about it because they have to guard the Prince on the journey through Europe.”

Feliks took off his hat and sat down, wondering whether this was true. One of the girls, a sad, shabby Russian, brought him tea in a glass. Feliks took a half-eaten lump of sugar from his pocket, placed it between his teeth and sipped the tea through the sugar in the peasant manner.

“The point being,” Ulrich went on, “that England could then have a war with Germany and make the Russians fight it.”

Feliks nodded.

The shabby girl said: “And it won’t be the princes and counts who get killed—it will be the ordinary Russian people.”

She was right, Feliks thought. The war would be fought by the peasants. He had spent most of his life among these people. They were hard, surly and narrow-minded, but their foolish generosity and their occasional spontaneous outbursts of sheer fun gave a hint of how they might be in a decent society. Their concerns were the weather, animals, disease, childbirth and outwitting the landlord. For a few years, in their late teens, they were sturdy and straight, and could smile and run fast and flirt; but soon they became bowed and gray and slow and sullen. Now Prince Orlov would take those young men in the springtime of their lives and march them in front of a cannon to be shot to pieces or maimed forever, no doubt for the very best reasons of international diplomacy.

It was things like this that made Feliks an anarchist.

“What is to be done?” said Ulrich.

“We must blaze the news across the front pages of
Mutiny!
” said the shabby girl.

They began to discuss how the story should be handled. Feliks listened. Editorial matters interested him little. He distributed the magazine and wrote articles about how to make bombs, and he was deeply discontented. He had become terribly civilized in Geneva. He drank beer instead of vodka, wore a collar and a tie and went to concerts of orchestral music. He had a job in a bookshop. Meanwhile Russia was in turmoil. The oil workers were at war with the Cossacks, the parliament was impotent and a million workers were on strike. Czar Nicholas II was the most incompetent and asinine ruler a degenerate aristocracy could produce. The country was a powder barrel waiting for a spark, and Feliks wanted to be that spark. But it was fatal to go back. Joe Stalin had gone back, and no sooner had he set foot on Russian soil than he had been sent to Siberia. The secret police knew the exiled revolutionaries better than they knew those still at home. Feliks was chafed by his stiff collar, his leather shoes and his circumstances.

He looked around at the little group of anarchists: Ulrich, the printer, with white hair and an inky apron, an intellectual who loaned Feliks books by Proudhon and Kropotkin but also a man of action who had once helped Feliks rob a bank; Olga, the shabby girl, who had seemed to be falling in love with Feliks until, one day, she saw him break a policeman’s arm and became frightened of him; Vera, the promiscuous poetess; Yevno, the philosophy student who talked a lot about a cleansing wave of blood and fire; Hans, the watchmaker who saw into people’s souls as if he had them under his magnifying glass; and Pyotr, the dispossessed Count, writer of brilliant economic tracts and inspirational revolutionary editorials. They were sincere and hardworking people, and all very clever. Feliks knew their importance, for he had been inside Russia among the desperate people who waited impatiently for smuggled newspapers and pamphlets and passed them from hand to hand until they fell to pieces. Yet it was not enough, for economic tracts were no protection against police bullets, and fiery articles would not burn palaces.

Ulrich was saying: “This news deserves wider circulation than it will get in
Mutiny.
I want every peasant in Russia to know that Orlov would lead him into a useless and bloody war over something that concerns him not at all.”

Olga said: “The first problem is whether we will be believed.”

Feliks said: “The first problem is whether the story is true.”

“We can check,” Ulrich said. “The London comrades could find out whether Orlov arrives when he is supposed to arrive, and whether he meets the people he needs to meet.”

“It’s not enough to spread the news,” Yevno said excitedly. “We must put a stop to this!”

“How?” said Ulrich, looking at young Yevno over the top of his wire-rimmed spectacles.

“We should call for the assassination of Orlov—he is a traitor, betraying the people, and he should be executed.”

“Would that stop the talks?”

“It probably would,” said Count Pyotr. “Especially if the assassin were an anarchist. Remember, England gives political asylum to anarchists, and this infuriates the Czar. Now, if one of his princes were killed in England by one of our comrades, the Czar might well be angry enough to call off the whole negotiation.”

Yevno said: “What a story we would have then! We could say that Orlov had been assassinated by one of us for treason against the Russian people.”

“Every newspaper in the world would carry
that
report,” Ulrich mused.

“Think of the effect it would have at home. You know how Russian peasants feel about conscription—it’s a death sentence. They hold a funeral when a boy goes into the army. If they learned that the Czar was planning to make them fight a major European war, the rivers would run red with blood …”

He was right, Feliks thought. Yevno always talked like that, but this time he was right.

Ulrich said: “I think you’re in dreamland, Yevno. Orlov is on a secret mission—he won’t ride through London in an open carriage waving to the crowds. Besides, I know the London comrades—they’ve never assassinated anyone. I don’t see how it can be done.”

“I do,” Feliks said. They all looked at him. The shadows on their faces shifted in the flickering candlelight. “I know how it can be done.” His voice sounded strange to him, as if his throat were constricted. “I’ll go to London. I’ll kill Orlov.”

The room was suddenly quiet, as all the talk of death and destruction suddenly became real and concrete in their midst. They stared at him in surprise, all except Ulrich, who smiled knowingly, almost as if he had planned, all along, that it would turn out this way.

TWO

L
ondon was unbelievably rich. Feliks had seen extravagant wealth in Russia and much prosperity in Europe, but not on this scale. Here
nobody
was in rags. In fact, although the weather was warm, everyone was wearing several layers of heavy clothing. Feliks saw carters, street vendors, sweepers, laborers and delivery boys—all sporting fine factory-made coats without holes or patches. All the children wore boots. Every woman had a hat, and such hats! They were mostly enormous things, as broad across as the wheel of a dog cart, and decorated with ribbons, feathers, flowers and fruit. The streets were teeming. He saw more motor cars in the first five minutes than he had in all his life. There seemed to be as many cars as there were horse-drawn vehicles. On wheels or on foot, everyone was rushing.

In Piccadilly Circus all the vehicles were at a standstill, and the cause was one familiar in any city: a horse had fallen and its cart had overturned. A crowd of men struggled to get beast and wagon upright, while from the pavement flower girls and ladies with painted faces shouted encouragement and made jokes.

As he went farther east his initial impression of great wealth was somewhat modified. He passed a domed cathedral which was called St. Paul’s, according to the map he had bought at Victoria Station, and thereafter he was in poorer districts. Abruptly, the magnificent facades of banks and office buildings gave place to small row houses in varying states of disrepair. There were fewer cars and more horses, and the horses were thinner. Most of the shops were street stalls. There were no more delivery boys. Now he saw plenty of barefoot children—not that it mattered, for in this climate, it seemed to him, they had no need of boots anyway.

Things got worse as he penetrated deeper into the East End. Here were crumbling tenements, squalid courtyards and stinking alleys, where human wrecks dressed in rags picked over piles of garbage, looking for food. Then Feliks entered Whitechapel High Street, and saw the familiar beards, long hair and traditional robes of assorted Orthodox Jews, and tiny shops selling smoked fish and kosher meat: it was like being in the Russian Pale, except that the Jews did not look frightened.

He made his way to 165 Jubilee Street, the address Ulrich had given him. It was a two-story building that looked like a Lutheran chapel. A notice outside said The Workers Friend Club and Institute was open to all working men regardless of politics, but another notice betrayed the nature of the place by announcing that it had been opened in 1906 by Peter Kropotkin. Feliks wondered whether he would meet the legendary Kropotkin here in London.

He went in. He saw in the lobby a pile of newspapers, also called
The Workers Friend
but in Yiddish:
Der Arbeiter Fraint.
Notices on the walls advertised lessons in English, a Sunday school, a trip to Epping Forest and a lecture on
Hamlet
. Feliks stepped into the hall. The architecture confirmed his earlier instinct: this had definitely been the nave of a nonconformist church once upon a time. However, it had been transformed by the addition of a stage at one end and a bar at the other. On the stage a group of men and women appeared to be rehearsing a play. Perhaps this was what anarchists did in England, Feliks thought; that would explain why they were allowed to have clubs. He went over to the bar. There was no sign of alcoholic drink, but on the counter he saw gefilte fish, pickled herring and—joy!—a samovar.

The girl behind the counter looked at him and said, “
Nu?
”

Feliks smiled.

A week later, on the day that Prince Orlov was due to arrive in London, Feliks had lunch at a French restaurant in Soho. He arrived early and picked a table near the door. He ate onion soup, fillet steak and goat’s cheese, and drank half a bottle of red wine. He ordered in French. The waiters were deferential. When he finished, it was the height of the lunch-hour rush. At a moment when three of the waiters were in the kitchen and the other two had their backs to him he calmly got up, went to the door, took his coat and hat and left without paying.

He smiled as he walked down the street. He enjoyed stealing.

He had quickly learned how to live in this town on almost no money. For breakfast he would buy sweet tea and a slab of bread from a street stall for twopence, but that was the only food he would pay for. At lunchtime he stole fruit or vegetables from street stalls. In the evening he would go to a charity soup kitchen and get a bowl of broth and unlimited bread in return for listening to an incomprehensible sermon and singing a hymn. He had five pounds in cash but it was for emergencies.

He was living at Dunstan Houses in Stepney Green, in a five-story tenement building where lived half the leading anarchists in London. He had a mattress on the floor in the apartment of Rudolf Rocker, the charismatic blond German who edited
Der Arbeiter Fraint.
Rocker’s charisma did not work on Feliks, who was immune to charm, but Feliks respected the man’s total dedication. Rocker and his wife, Milly, kept open house for anarchists, and all day—and half the night—there were visitors, messengers, debates, committee meetings and endless tea and cigarettes. Feliks paid no rent, but each day he brought home something—a pound of sausages, a packet of tea, a pocketful of oranges—for the communal larder. They thought he bought these things, but of course he stole them.

He told the other anarchists he was here to study at the British Museum and finish his book about natural anarchism in primitive communities. They believed him. They were friendly, dedicated and harmless: they sincerely believed the revolution could be brought about by education and trade unionism, by pamphlets and lectures and trips to Epping Forest. Feliks knew that most anarchists outside Russia were like this. He did not hate them, but secretly he despised them, for in the end they were just frightened.

Nevertheless, among such groups there were generally a few violent men. When he needed them he would seek them out.

Meanwhile he worried about whether Orlov would come and about how he would kill him. Such worries were useless, and he tried to distract his mind by working on his English. He had learned a little of the language in cosmopolitan Switzerland. During the long train journey across Europe he had studied a school textbook for Russian children and an English translation of his favorite novel,
The Captain’s Daughter
by Pushkin, which he knew almost by heart in Russian. Now he read
The Times
every morning in the reading room of the Jubilee Street club, and in the afternoons he walked the streets, striking up conversations with drunks, vagrants and prostitutes—the people he liked best, the people who broke the rules. The printed words in books soon meshed with the sounds all around him, and already he could say anything he needed to. Before long he would be able to talk politics in English.

After leaving the restaurant he walked north, across Oxford Street, and entered the German quarter west of Tottenham Court Road. There were a lot of revolutionists among the Germans, but they tended to be communists rather than anarchists. Feliks admired the discipline of the communists but he was suspicious of their authoritarianism; and besides, he was temperamentally unsuited to party work.

He walked all the way across Regent’s Park and entered the middle-class suburb to its north. He wandered around the tree-lined streets, looking into the small gardens of the neat brick villas, searching for a bicycle to steal. He had learned to ride a bicycle in Switzerland, and had discovered that it was the perfect vehicle for shadowing someone, for it was maneuverable and inconspicuous, and in city traffic it was fast enough to keep up with a motor car or a carriage. Sadly, the bourgeois citizens of this part of London seemed to keep their bicycles locked away. He saw one cycle being ridden along the street and was tempted to knock the rider off the machine, but at that moment there were three pedestrians and a baker’s van on the road, and Feliks did not want to create a scene. A little later he saw a boy delivering groceries, but the boy’s cycle was too conspicuous, with a large basket on the front and a metal plate hanging from the crossbar, bearing the name of the grocer. Feliks was beginning to toy with alternative strategies when at last he saw what he needed.

A man of about thirty came out of one of the gardens wheeling a bicycle. The man wore a straw boater and a striped blazer which bulged over his paunch. He leaned his cycle against the garden wall and bent down to put on his trouser clips.

Feliks approached him rapidly.

The man saw his shadow, looked up, and muttered: “Good afternoon.”

Feliks knocked him down.

The man rolled onto his back and looked up at Feliks with a stupid expression of surprise.

Feliks fell on him, dropping one knee into the middle button of the striped blazer. The man’s breath left his body in a whoosh, and he was winded, helpless, gasping for air.

Feliks stood up and glanced toward the house. A young woman stood at a window watching, her hand raised to her open mouth, her eyes wide with fright.

He looked again at the man on the ground: it would be a minute or so before he even thought about getting up.

Feliks climbed on the bicycle and rode away rapidly.

A man who has no fear can do anything he wants, Feliks thought. He had learned that lesson eleven years ago, in a railway siding outside Omsk. It had been snowing …

It was snowing. Feliks sat in an open railway truck, on a pile of coal, freezing to death.

He had been cold for a year, ever since he escaped from the chain gang in the gold mine. In that year he had crossed Siberia, from the frozen north almost to the Urals. Now he was a mere thousand miles from civilization and warm weather. Most of the way he had walked, although sometimes he rode in railcars or on wagons full of pelts. He preferred to ride with cattle, for they kept him warm and he could share their feed. He was vaguely aware that he was little more than an animal himself. He never washed, his coat was a blanket stolen from a horse, his ragged clothes were full of lice and there were fleas in his hair. His favorite food was raw birds’ eggs. Once he had stolen a pony, ridden it to death, then eaten its liver. He had lost his sense of time. He knew it was autumn, by the weather, but he did not know what month he was in. Often he found himself unable to remember what he had done the day before. In his saner moments he realized he was half mad. He never spoke to people. When he came to a town or village he skirted it, pausing only to rob the garbage dump. He knew only that he had to keep going west, for it would be warmer there.

But the coal train had been shunted onto a siding, and Feliks thought he might be dying. There was a guard, a burly policeman in a fur coat, who was there to stop peasants from taking coal for their fires … As that thought occurred to him, Feliks realized he was having a lucid moment, and that it might be his last. He wondered what had brought it on; then he smelled the policeman’s dinner. But the policeman was big and healthy and had a gun.

I don’t care, Feliks thought; I’m dying anyway.

So he stood up, and picked up the biggest lump of coal he could carry, and staggered over to the policeman’s hut, and went in, and hit the startled policeman over the head with the lump of coal.

There was a pot on the fire and stew in the pot, too hot to eat. Feliks carried the pot outside and emptied it out into the snow; then he fell on his knees and ate the food mixed with cooling snow. There were lumps of potato and turnip, and fat carrots, and chunks of meat. He swallowed them whole. The policeman came out of the hut and hit Feliks with his club, a heavy blow across the back. Feliks was wild with rage that the man should try to stop him from eating. He got up from the ground and flew at the man, kicking and scratching. The policeman fought back with his club, but Feliks could not feel the blows. He got his fingers on the man’s throat and squeezed. He would not let go. After a while the man’s eyes closed; then his face went blue; then his tongue came out; then Feliks finished the stew.

He ate all the food in the hut, and warmed himself by the fire, and slept in the policeman’s bed. When he woke up he was sane. He took the boots and the coat off the corpse and walked to Omsk. On the way he made a remarkable discovery about himself: he had lost the ability to feel fear. Something had happened in his mind, as if a switch had closed. He could think of nothing that could possibly frighten him. If hungry, he would steal; if chased, he would hide; if threatened, he would kill. There was nothing he wanted. Nothing could hurt him anymore. Love, pride, desire and compassion were forgotten emotions.

They all came back, eventually, except the fear.

When he reached Omsk he sold the policeman’s fur coat and bought trousers and a shirt, a waistcoat and a topcoat. He burned his rags and paid one ruble for a hot bath and a shave in a cheap hotel. He ate in a restaurant, using a knife instead of his fingers. He saw the front page of a newspaper, and remembered how to read; and then he knew he had come back from the grave.

He sat on a bench in Liverpool Street station, his bicycle leaning against the wall beside him. He wondered what Orlov was like. He knew nothing about the man other than his rank and mission. The Prince might be a dull, plodding, loyal servant of the Czar, or a sadist and a lecher, or a kindly white-haired old man who liked nothing better than to bounce his grandchildren on his knee. It did not matter: Feliks would kill him anyway.

He was confident he would recognize Orlov, for Russians of that type had not the faintest conception of traveling unobtrusively, secret mission or no.

Would Orlov come? If he did come, and arrived on the very train Josef had specified, and if he subsequently met with the Earl of Walden as Josef had said he would, then there could hardly be any further doubt that Josef’s information had been accurate.

A few minutes before the train was due, a closed coach drawn by four magnificent horses clattered by and drove straight onto the platform. There was a coachman in front and a liveried footman hanging on behind. A railwayman in a military-style coat with shiny buttons strode after the coach. The railwayman spoke to the coachman and directed him to the far end of the platform. Then a stationmaster in a frock coat and top hat arrived, looking important, consulting his job watch and comparing it critically with the station clocks. He opened the carriage door for the passenger to step down.