Twelve (12 page)

I paused, hoping my words had struck home, though to what purpose I didn't know. Maks sat silently in his chair, not even looking at me. Suddenly I saw what he had seen. I don't know how they had entered or how long they had been there, but I now perceived in the dim candlelight that standing around us in a circle were Pyetr, Iuda, Filipp, Andrei, Iakov Zevedayinich and Varfolomei.

With regard to Maks, the Oprichniki had their own plans for justice.

'I
THINK YOU CAN LEAVE US NOW, ALEKSEI IVANOVICH,' SAID PYETR
. He stood directly opposite me, with Maks sitting halfway between us.

'What do you mean?'

'It is three of our fellows who have died at Maksim Sergeivich's hand. It is for us to punish him.'

'Maksim Sergeivich is a traitor to his oath as an officer in the Russian army. I am to take him back to Moscow for court-martial,' I announced firmly, despite the fact that I was in no position to enforce my will on them.

Pyetr was resolute, speaking almost in a whisper. 'He is
ours
.'

A thought occurred to me. 'How did you know we were here?'

Pyetr didn't have the presence of mind to ignore the question; instead he answered with an obvious lie. 'We followed you.'

'No, you didn't,' I told him. 'Otherwise you wouldn't have arrived such a long time after me.'

'Dmitry Fetyukovich told us,' said Iuda.

'And how did he know?'

'I've no idea. Why don't you go back to Moscow and ask him?' replied Iuda.

'Why don't you go back and ask your whore?' said Filipp, and a few of them laughed the same, grubby laugh that I'd heard before.

Iuda came over and took my arm, leading me aside. I glanced down at Maks and saw that he sat in a petrified silence, smart enough to know that he could not run and could not fight and so frantically searching for an alternative way to escape.

'This is really much the best solution, you know, Aleksei,' Iuda said to me smoothly. 'You know that he's a traitor and you know that he deserves to die. But do you want it on your conscience that you killed your friend – or even that you took him back to Moscow to be killed?'

I made no answer.

'Do you doubt that he's a traitor?' continued Iuda.

'No.'

'So he deserves to die.'

'He does.'

'And if you leave him here with us' – Iuda's voice had dropped to a whisper – 'then you'll always be able to say that you were outnumbered; that whatever you believed to be right didn't matter because if you had resisted, we would still have succeeded by force, and you would both be dead.' It was both a cajolement and a threat and it succeeded. I didn't care to ask myself which of the two was the more persuasive.

I went over to Maks and drew his sabre from its scabbard. He was condemned to death and it somehow seemed to lessen the reality of the fact by going through the ritual. I stood in front of him and held the sword above his head, my hands spread wide apart. Maks looked up at me, tears showing behind the lenses of his eyeglasses.

'Please don't do this to me, Aleksei.'

'This is what happens to traitors, Maks. You know that,' I replied quietly, trying to fill my head with such hatred for his treachery that it would drive out all sympathy.

'Not the sword. I mean, don't leave me with them.'

'One death is much like another, Maks,' I told him, though I knew even then it was a lie. 'Would you prefer it to be done by friends?'

He smiled resignedly and then looked away.

I'd never intentionally broken a sabre before and there was no training for this sort of thing given in the army. The sword bent and bent and bent still further, until the blade was almost doubled back on itself, and yet still it would not break. With my arms outstretched as they were over Maks' head, I was at the limit of what strength I could apply. My muscles began to ache with cramp, screaming at me to relieve them of the strain. It took all my energy to keep the blade at the angle I had achieved, but I was rapidly losing the strength to do even that, let alone to bend it further to its breaking point. Suddenly, with a dissonant chime that reminded me somehow of the hissing of a snake, the steel shattered. Both my arms jarred excruciatingly as the release of the metal's stress echoed through them. My left hand, clutching the sharp blade tightly with its two remaining fingers, began to bleed from a cut across the palm.

Two of the Oprichniki, Filipp and Varfolomei I think, took a step forward to assist me, but Iuda raised an arm to hold them back, understanding that this was something I must do alone.

I remembered what I had been about to say minutes earlier, when the Oprichniki arrived. 'How could you of all people, Maks, justify the killing of your fellow man by saying it was in the name of humanity?' I took the two halves of the broken sword, placed them side by side and tossed them dismissively into Maks' lap. Then I turned and walked into the darkness of the night outside.

'But that's the point, Aleksei,' screamed Maks after me in desperation. 'I thought you understood. They're not—' Whatever they were not (and whoever 'they' were), I did not hear. Maks' voice was cut off by a brief, startled yelp as one of the Oprichniki either hit him or . . . I didn't like to think. It was only hours later that I realized that that final sound from Maks was exactly the same cry I had heard from the French soldier, victim of that same terrible group of men, less than a week before in Goryachkino.

Half of my mind had no regrets, and I consoled myself with the knowledge that it was the half with which Maksim himself would have agreed. Taking a step back, I couldn't pity Maks or that French soldier for the way they died, nor could I pity the death of a Russian traitor more than that of a French patriot, nor a foreign mercenary more than a friend of seven years' standing. There's no good way to die and no good reason to die. Death is momentarily unpleasant for those who experience it and often expedient for those who cause it, but the details of the moment of death are not worth worrying about.

The other half of me knew that I had only left Maks there with the Oprichniki out of cowardice. Practical, rational cowardice to be sure (is there any other kind?), but still the fact remained that my intention had been to bring Maks back to Moscow and the reason I hadn't was because of a risk to my own life. Wouldn't that risk have been worth it to give Maks one more hour or one more day of life? Mightn't it have given him one final chance to explain himself in a way that I hadn't so far been able to understand?

As my horse followed its nose and headed back to Moscow with little guidance from me, my mind was filled only with happy memories of the beautiful young man I had just left to die. His treachery, which had concerned me so obsessively for what? – six hours at most – and which had been the cause of his death, was totally forgotten amongst remembrances of his wit, his exuberance and his sparkling cynicism.

In the early hours, as I finally reached the outskirts of Moscow, I realized that although he had been alive when I left him, and though he was, beyond any doubt, dead now, I had no idea of the precise time of Maksim's death, because I had not been there. I recalled the death of my father and my similar ignorance then of its exact moment. I had been scarcely more than a child and my mother had, for what she saw as my protection, kept me out of his room through the last hours of his illness. I remember, as I sat and waited, I had repeatedly wondered how I should be feeling; whether I should be praying for him to survive or mourning the fact that he had not. I had no real concern that getting it wrong would have any practical effect on the fate of my father, but it certainly had an overwhelming bearing on how I felt.

I had vowed then never to make the same mistake – never to walk away and be absent at the moment of a friend's death. And yet here today I had failed to keep that vow, as I would fail again. I could excuse myself of the practical cowardice of allowing the Oprichniki to take him, but there was no defence for my moral cowardice in not staying with him until the end. In any sense that mattered, I had left him to die alone. Worse still, he had known it.

It was morning when I arrived back in Moscow and, in the hours that I had been away, the mood of the city had changed beyond any imagining. The remnants of our army, which Vadim and I had overtaken so easily on the road from Borodino, were now arriving in the city. They were not arriving to regroup, not arriving to make a stand, but arriving because they had nowhere else to go. If they had feared that extra tens of thousands of soldiers would make the city overcrowded, they need not have. As the soldiers were entering, so the civilians were leaving – their confidence of months before in the unreachability of Moscow now vanished. The streets were awash with movement, always from the west, always to the east. Carts piled high with furniture, with fabrics, with silver and with gold, headed out of Moscow, their owners riding up front and keeping a careful eye on their possessions. On some, I could even see the owners, or as often their servants, spread across the goods on the cart like some many-legged spider, trying to keep a hand on every item, so that none might fall by the wayside to be gathered up by the advancing French, who, they were now certain, would soon arrive.

Behind the carts of the people of Moscow came the wagons carrying their wounded defenders. The casualties of Borodino filled any street of the city that was not already occupied by the departing citizens. As one lavishly appointed cartload of property left to the east, it made room for another to enter, loaded with the dying or even the dead. Where the two strata met, there was sometimes a mixing, sometimes a separation. Some of the citizens were repelled by the sight of those who had so bravely fought to defend them, others gladly unloaded their most treasured possessions to make a little room for one wounded soldier to be taken to safety. But while such self-sacrifice might save the life of a single man, it would remove only a drop from the ocean of humanity that was now pouring into the city.

And yet it was one more drop of humanity than I had managed to save that day.

I had no immediate desire to find Vadim and Dmitry. I would have no problem explaining to
them
why I had returned, against Vadim's instructions, without Maks, but I did not relish the doubting voice in my own head that I knew I must hear as I told them. Though why should I listen to that voice now? It had been happy enough to keep a cowardly silence back in Desna. A man's conscience shouts so much more loudly in the past tense than it ever manages to achieve in the present.

If I was not to see Vadim and Dmitry immediately, then there was only one other place in Moscow that I could go. My intention was simple enough. However cowardly and however shocking it might seem, those souls that were now fleeing the city were acting wisely, and I was going to ensure that Domnikiia would be one of them; to ensure that she had a safe place to go and to give her enough money to provide for her food and travel as she made her way there. At the back of my mind was the fear that the abandonment of Moscow might be the furthest thing possible from her inclination. As I pushed my way through the crowded streets, fending off those citizens unfortunate enough to be travelling on foot and pushing away the blindly searching hands of soldiers who lay dying on open carts, I realized that the city would soon be full of French soldiers; rich, victorious and, above all, amorous French soldiers. Domnikiia could make more from them in a day than she had done of late in a week from the crushed Muscovites. Would she, I wondered, find more popularity as the homely, French Dominique who could remind them of their sweethearts back in Paris or as the exotic, erotic and, most importantly, vanquished Russian Domnikiia? But I was, as I knew well by now, no judge of a Russian's patriotism. When I arrived, she was preparing to leave.

Although it was past one o'clock, well into the brothel's normal trading hours, I arrived to find the door closed and locked. I stepped back into the square and threw a stone up at Domnikiia's window. The window opened and out popped the head of Margarita Kirillovna.

'We're closed,' she snapped.

'Margarita!' I called. She screwed up her eyes as she tried to recognize me. 'Is Domnikiia there?'

Her head disappeared and the window closed again. I waited. Minutes later, I heard the bolts being drawn back at the door. This time, the face that half peeped outside was Domnikiia's. I went over and tried to kiss her, but she smoothly avoided it, beckoning me hurriedly inside and bolting the door behind me. Within, I encountered one of the most beautiful visions of chaos I could ever have imagined. The salon was a mélange of beautiful girls packing their beautiful clothes into trunks, which, though relatively plain, somehow managed to assimilate the beauty of what was going on around them. There were eight girls working at the brothel, and although I had a heart only for one, I had eyes for them all. In their demure, controlled, professional allure they were a temptation to the most puritan of men. In their natural, girlish panic their charm was only augmented by their vitality.

I followed Domnikiia up to her room, where a large trunk took centre stage, half filled with clothes. Margarita came back and forth from her room, adding new layers of attire to the trunk, and as soon as we entered the room, Domnikiia strode over to her wardrobe and began to do the same. She had not spoken a word to me since I had arrived.

As she passed me, I grabbed her wrist and pulled her to me, but this time it was I who aborted our kiss. I had not seen before, since it had been hidden by the door earlier and by her avoiding my direct gaze since, that she had bruises on her right eye and on her high, round cheek. Her upper lip was split just below her right nostril and though it was not a fresh wound, it still oozed blood from where she had reopened it trying to smile. On her jaw I could also see, now I looked closely, the faint bruising of where she had been held by a large, brutal hand.

Although the very conception made me for a moment despise myself more even than I did her assailant, I felt a thrill of attraction for her run through me that was greater than anything I had felt towards her before. Her beauty was accentuated, not hidden, by the vulnerability endowed upon her by those wounds.

I kissed her lips as lightly as I dared, not wanting to hurt her physically, but neither wanting to suggest any diminution of my passion for her as a consequence of these blemishes.

'Who did this to you?'

'I asked you who Dmitry was,' she replied acerbically. 'I found out.'