Twelve (17 page)

French troops spread in waves across the deserted city, showing little concern for the few Russians that remained. I was stopped occasionally, but there were far too few Russian speakers amongst them to accompany every platoon. When challenged I, like others I saw in the city, had merely to reply with a stream of suitably grovelling Russian babble and I was allowed on my way.

That day was a Monday, and our arranged meeting place for Mondays was Red Square itself. In more conventional times, it was an ideal location for a covert meeting, thronged as it was with crowds from which two or three figures in conversation would not stand out. Today, however, the crowds were crowds of French soldiery. To meet there would have been brave, and when carrying out acts of sabotage in an occupied city, bravery is not a quality that goes hand in hand with success.

I skirted around the square, returning three times that evening, but saw no sign of Vadim, or Dmitry, or of any of the Oprichniki.

I returned to the house that I'd been staying in only to discover that it was already a temporary barracks for a dozen or so French officers. Wisely, I had not left those few possessions I had inside. Climbing up to the roof, I found the small bundle I had hidden there, along with my sword, safe and intact. None of those inside heard me as I retrieved them. I headed further south and found somewhat less luxurious, but still serviceable accommodation, which the French had decided was beneath them. I was not the first man in history, nor would I be the last, forced to sleep in a stable.

The following day, there was little I could do but wander around the city. Food was still reasonably abundant, but at a price. Those Muscovites who had stayed behind may have had numerous reasons for doing so, but for some there was a profit to be made. An invading army could, of course, simply requisition every item of food, every bottle of vodka and any other victuals that they desired, but though they would get what they consumed for nothing, it would also be the last they would get. A moving army can pillage, but a resting army must trade. It must employ others to go out of the city and resupply what it requires. This, at least, was the conventional wisdom. I believed it and, to my best estimation, Bonaparte believed it too. As ever, we had both underestimated the resolution of the Russian peasant. A few fresh supplies found their way into the city, but precious little. The French – and their horses – in the end had to survive on what was already stocked up in cellars and storehouses. It would not be enough. Had the French realized this, their stay in Moscow might have been even shorter – and that might indeed have saved them, if they had left in time to get out of Russia ahead of winter. Not all of the French army did understand the need for trade, but the few remaining Moscow tradesmen supplied those who did as well as, conveniently, supplying me. I suspect that, had I chosen to disguise myself as a French officer while I stayed in Moscow, then I could have fed myself at half the price. There were few discounts offered to an abandoned Russian butler.

Compared with two days ago, Moscow was once again teeming with life. Bonaparte's army was, at this stage in his campaign, perhaps 100,000 strong – appallingly fewer than the number that he started out with, but enough to give the city some pale shadow of revivification. Still they were fewer than half the true population of the city, but they spent more time out on the streets than had the real Muscovites, who had homes to go to, so Moscow seemed busy, superficially.

I remember once, when fighting south of the Danube, I surveyed through my spyglass an abandoned battlefield, scattered with the corpses of both friend and foe. Suddenly, I had seen movement. A soldier, lying on his back, his face covered with blood, whom everyone had taken for dead, was moving his hand. It had been the slightest of motions, made through the terrible pain of his injuries, but the fact that he could confront that pain and vanquish it sufficiently to make that feeble signal showed how much he wanted to indicate that he was alive – how much he wanted to live.

The field had still been under Turkish fire, but I had dashed out, oblivious to the shouts of my commanding officer, bending low as if it might save me from enemy gunshot. I had to rescue that poor, injured man. I made it to where he was and threw myself to the ground. I could hear the whizzing of bullets around me, but I don't think that they were aimed at me. My first intention was to murmur some words of encouragement into the soldier's ear; to let him know that if he wanted to live, then I was there to help him. Then I had to find a way to drag his weak body across the vast expanse of land that separated us from our own lines.

And then I saw his hand.

It was still moving, but the movement was not a desperate signal for assistance – the last plea of a dying man clinging to life – it was simply the wriggling of a hundred maggots. They had eaten most of his hand away, but their gluttonous writhing had, to the eyes of a man who had wanted to see life where there was none, seemed like a coherent motion; a twitching of the fingers that the maggots had long since assimilated.

In just such a way might the casual viewer conceive that life had in fact returned to Moscow. The streets were once again filled with vitality, with bustle, with commotion. But looking closely they would see that those figures that filled the streets, though they might on the surface look like the city's former inhabitants, were living on the city, not in it. Their purpose was to consume what they found (notwithstanding that trade rather than pillage might be a more efficient approach to the task of consumption), not to nurture for the benefit of their successors or for the benefit of the city itself.

Moscow was as full of life as a cadaver on the embalmer's table. The fluids and chemicals that had been introduced into its veins can engorge it sufficiently to give it some vague semblance of the living creature that it once was, but they would never have the ability to provide the vital essence that once made that body a man. The image brought to my mind the Oprichniki. They passed themselves off physically as men, but I had never seen in any one of them a hint of the desires and loves and anguishes of living beings.

Did the French occupiers, I wondered, perceive themselves as parasites feasting on the corpse of a once-great city, or did they believe that they were the vanguard of a new wave of life that had revitalized all the rest of Europe and was now supplying the physical reality of the Enlightenment to Russia? I think that Bonaparte himself probably believed that, but I also think he was deluding himself. Maks had shared Bonaparte's delusion.

It had been almost four hours since I had thought of Maks.

It was in the mid-afternoon of that day, the third of September, that I heard the first stories of fires raging in Moscow. I had invested in a substantial quantity of tobacco and was furtively offering it at an entirely unreasonable price to any French officer or soldier that I came across. The most unanticipated thing that I learned from this was that I had missed my calling. By the time I had sold scarcely a third of my stock, I had more than made back what I had paid for it. I understood how those few thousand who had remained in Moscow, however much they feared for their lives, must have been tempted by the profit that was to be had.

The profit which I was seeking was in the currency not of gold, but of knowledge. I still maintained the simplistic façade of a man who spoke no French, and so I was able to pick up all the news of plans and deployments that the French were discussing, as well as the gossip and tittle-tattle.

Fires were springing up all over Moscow. The French stories were that former convicts in the prisons of Moscow had been released and instructed by the departed governor, Rostopchin, to burn down the city, rather than let the French occupy it. The Muscovites I spoke to told, predictably, a different story: it was the French who were starting the fires, intent not just on occupying the city, not just on raping it, but ultimately on destroying it. This made little sense to me; no maggot could ever be pleased to see the corpse on which it fed cremated. Another point of view was that the fires were simply accidents. The French cared less for the city than did its inhabitants, so they would be less concerned about a toppled candle or a leaping cinder. In addition, with no civil authorities in place, there was no organization – nor any impetus – to put out any fire caused in such a way. Formerly, Moscow had been well stocked with hoses and pumps and men who knew how to operate them, but all had vanished with the evacuation. The Russians and the French stared at one another over the blazing city, each blaming the other, and neither was prepared to blink.

Among the stories about the fires, there were other rumours that I picked up; rumours that were frighteningly familiar; rumours that there was a plague in Moscow. And as I heard more of these rumours, the idea of a plague began to transform. The French were beginning to talk of strangulations, of disappearances, of a pack of wild animals.

The Oprichniki were doing their work. And yet I wondered if the two phenomena might not be related. The Oprichniki had no preconceptions of war, found no barriers of convention or custom that they would not cross. Perhaps the fires too were part of their unconventional solution to the goal of ejecting the French. I doubted whether I could have sacrificed the city itself to that goal, but the Oprichniki, as outsiders, had no such scruples. And so I might have failed where they would succeed. With the Oprichniki it was very easy (and very pleasing) to mortgage one's scruples, knowing that after the battle those scruples would be returned to one untouched – neither diminished nor consulted.

Tuesday's rendezvous was the church of Saint Clement, in the suburb of Zamoskvorechye, not so far from my new residence. Its priest had, it seemed, abandoned it and left Moscow, convinced that it was beyond his abilities to convert these invaders from their atheism to godliness, let alone to Christianity, let even more alone to the Orthodox religion.

I felt a chill as I gazed up at the church's red walls, feeling a sensation of menace that I imagine is not uncommon in even the most pious of men when encountering the overawing physical presence of such a building. A church, we all know from our earliest years, is the house of the Lord; a place of love and sanctuary. And yet the presentiment of horror and menace that I felt, huddled in the darkness of the gateway, lit only by the setting half-moon, must surely be one that is shared by all. I suppose it is because a church, however much we associate it with the love of Christ, is a place that we also associate with the dead. It cuts to the very heart of our belief. The bliss of paradise is the ultimate reward towards which the life of every Christian is directed, and yet how much do we all fear death? We fear death so greatly that we even fear those most incapacitated of creatures: the dead themselves.

I glanced around, but still saw no sign of Vadim or Dmitry, or indeed of any of the Oprichniki.

It seemed like only moments later when I looked around again, to find I had been joined by Ioann and Foma.

I
FELT A SENSATION OF SELF-LOATHING AS I DISCOVERED HOW
pleasant – I'm afraid that
is
the correct word – it was to see these familiar faces. Without doubt, I wanted to meet with Vadim, or even Dmitry, but to be able to speak freely with people that I knew, be it for only a few weeks, was a relief. The constant pressure of pretence as a covert patriot amongst a swarm of invaders is debilitating. Despite the fact that somewhere in my mind I had been hoping that if it had to be an Oprichnik it would be Iuda who came along, I think that my smile was genuine as I shook both Foma and Ioann by the hand.

'I'm glad to see you,' I told them. They smiled and nodded as if they hadn't quite followed the detail of the French I had spoken to them, but appreciated the sentiment.

'Where have you been staying?' I slowed the pace of my speech and, I fear, introduced the tone of condescension which one uses when speaking to people who understand neither French nor Russian.

'We have found a cellar,' said Foma. 'It is a perfect lair.' I forgave him his odd choice of words. I had learned French from an early age, in parallel with learning Russian itself. For someone who learned it later in life, the subtle ambiguities of meaning are easily overlooked.

'Have you seen any of your comrades?' I asked.

They discussed the issue amongst themselves, using their own language, before Foma replied. 'We have seen one or two, but more importantly, we have seen their work.'

I understood that he meant by their 'work' the deaths of French soldiers. At the time, more than on any occasion before or certainly since, I felt complete accordance with their achievements and complete indifference to their methods.

'I have heard of your work too,' I told them. 'The French are quite afraid of you.'

'As far as I know, we have only killed twenty so far,' said Foma. He quickly followed up with an explanation of this small number. 'It is better to keep the numbers inconsequential. Even with so few deaths, you have already heard rumours; any more and there would be mobs rampaging the streets in search of us.'

'It's a lesson that we have learned at the expense of fallen friends,' interjected Ioann. 'We will have plenty of time in the city. We do not gorge like dogs, forgetting tomorrow.'

'Do you have anything to tell us?' asked Foma, cutting his friend short.

I briefly summarized what I had seen and heard of troop dispositions, but it, and I, felt superfluous. Moscow was full – full to bursting – of Frenchmen and their allies. The Oprichniki needed no more directing than a reaper needs pointing towards a field lush with wheat or than a fox needs to have a particular chicken marked out as his prey once he has found the henhouse. On the other hand, despite their revolutionary slogan, not all Frenchmen were equal, certainly not in terms of their threat to us. Officers were obviously more fruitful targets than men, and specialized officers – in the artillery or on the general staff – would be the greatest loss to the French military machine. So it was towards such locations, where I knew them, that I directed Foma and Ioann.

'Where are the fires at present?' asked Foma, when I had finished.

'See for yourself,' I said, pointing. 'All along Pokrovka Street, and other streets too.' Looking north over the city, the night sky was reddened by the glimmer of fire. The fires themselves showed up as glowing arcs that silhouetted groups of buildings. 'I suspected that you might have started them yourselves,' I added.

'Us?' Foma was taken aback, almost insulted by the suggestion, and also strangely afraid. 'Fire's no use to us.' He showed no inclination to explain further what he meant by this.

'We will go now,' he continued. 'We, or some of the others, will do our best to meet with you again tomorrow.' They both nodded a brief farewell to me and headed back to the street. Once there, they exchanged a few words with each other before separating, Ioann heading south and Foma north.

I knew that now was my opportunity. I had heard reports of the Oprichniki's work, and seen a choreographed display of it on the road near Borodino, but now was my first, irresistible opportunity to see them work for real. Foma was alone, and I took my chance.

I had tracked men in the past across vast distances, through woods and across mountains, and rarely been caught out by them. Pursuit through a city was somewhat different but had many principles in common. Out in the wilderness, one can sometimes track at a distance of a verst or more, knowing that any traces one's quarry leaves will remain for a few hours, and knowing also that he is most likely the only other human soul in the whole area.

In the city, one must keep closer. If Foma were to get far enough from me to turn two corners, then I might lose him. If I got so close as to be on the same stretch of road as him, he had only to glance over his shoulder and I would be seen. I had the advantage, however, that I knew Moscow intimately. If he went down one street, then I could slip down a sideroad, cover three sides of a square in the time it took him to cover one, and be at the next crossroads before he was.

He headed quickly north. Although he might not know Moscow in any great detail, he knew where he was going. When I had briefed the two Oprichniki earlier, I had told them that many of the French had billeted themselves in the north of the city, and so it was towards there that Foma was heading. Pursuit was made more difficult by the regular patrols of French soldiers, although they were a hindrance to Foma's progress as well. Since few of the French spoke Russian, his lack of the language would probably not be his undoing if he were stopped. He could simply jabber at them in his own tongue, which I guessed was some form of Romanian, and their ears would hear no distinction between what he said and the equally incomprehensible babble of genuine Russian. To me, the language that the Oprichniki spoke seemed to have more in common with Italian and French than it had with Russian, but that was to make a similar mistake. Whatever one's nationality, be it French, Russian or Japanese, there is an instinct not to bother with sub-classifications of things that have already been classified as foreign.

Foma still ran the risk, however, that he might meet a patrol which did have a Russian speaker in its ranks, and then he would be found out. Whether through this reasoning, or out of instinct, his approach to avoiding the problem was to avoid being seen. As a patrol (or indeed anyone) came near he would step into some dim doorway or alley and wait for them to pass. His skill at hiding in darkness was remarkable. At one point, when I was watching him from the far end of the street, he heard approaching footsteps and flung himself into the shadow of the wall at the end of a block of houses. It was as if he had vanished before my eyes.

I watched for several minutes as first an organized patrol and then a rowdy group of off-duty soldiers came past, and still he remained invisible. I got out my spyglass and looked again at the place where I had last seen him, but I could make out nothing but the vague shapes of dark shadows cast against the wall. Then, suddenly, what I was looking at transformed; not through any intrinsic change in itself, but simply by my unconscious reappraisal of what I was seeing. I wasn't staring at a shadow, but at the side of Foma's face, pressed against the wall in utter and complete stillness. It was that ability to stay quite still that somehow allowed him to disappear. His dark coat hid most of his body. Looking around further, I could also make out his hand, pressed against the wall as if reaching out to those who were passing by, but again implausibly still. Of the arm that I knew must lie somewhere between his hand and his face, I could make out nothing.

Looking back to his face, I noticed that there was one minuscule hint of movement. His eyes were flicking back and forth. They say that when a man dreams his body remains quite still and yet his eyes continue to move, indicating physically to the real world in which direction the dreamer is looking in his mind. The only difference was that Foma's eyes were open, following the stragglers of the off-duty soldiers as they tottered past.

After the last trailing man had gone by, his footsteps fading into the night, Foma moved and was suddenly quite visible once again. But he didn't continue on his way. He liked what he had seen and began to follow the soldiers back up the road. This time it was my turn to step back into the shadows as he passed.

Foma followed the soldiers, I followed Foma and we all headed gradually eastward into the outskirts of Kitay Gorod. Fresh flames shone to the south-east, but the area in which we found ourselves remained untouched, not just by fire, but by the French. Beyond the small troop that we were following, we saw no other patrols. Soon the soldiers came to their destination – an abandoned school building that they were using as their barracks. With the same laughter and jokes that had accompanied their entire journey across town, they made their way into the building and closed the door.

Foma was only a short way behind them, but again he had stood stock-still, with his back pressed to the wall, and had remained unseen by anyone but me. Hiding myself at the end of the street, I watched Foma to see what he would do next. Now that the boisterous revelry of the soldiers had ceased, my own breathing sounded deafeningly loud. Foma passed back and forth outside the school, gazing up at the high windows, reminding me of a cat pacing up and down beneath a caged bird, never doubting its ability to climb up and take the puny, twittering creature, but simply looking for the best route to ascend – the best route being that by which the cat is least likely to be found out.

After a little consideration, Foma stopped beneath one of the windows, deciding that it was the easiest one to reach, or perhaps noticing some slight clue that suggested he would be able to break it open. Without hesitation, he began to climb the wall. It was an astonishing feat, one which I could not have achieved, and neither could any but the most expert of climbers. He found every tiny crevice and fissure in the wall and somehow managed to insinuate his fingers or toes deeply enough inside to gain some purchase. Just as when he had been hiding, his body clung inseparably close to the wall, and as he moved each limb in turn, sliding it across to its next grip, his body flowed like water across a rock, never venturing away from the precipice he scaled in case it unbalanced him. The impression was of some sort of lizard or insect – no, neither of those, instead a spider – climbing up that wall, but I realized that Foma's achievement was not in truth inhuman, but superhuman. Any man with the strength and skill and experience – and, it has to be said, daring – could have achieved it. I was not such a man, and it was difficult to conceive that a man so unprepossessing as Foma could in any area of activity be so exceptionally talented.

He reached the window and opened it without trouble, scuttling into the building with a swiftness that almost made it appear he had been pulled from inside. There was no way that I would be able to follow him, nor had I any desire to find myself trapped in a room with him as he discovered that I had been following him.

I crept up to the school building and listened. All was silent within; no hint of what Foma might be doing inside, nor any reaction from any of the soldiers who slept there. There was little I could do but wait, and hope that Foma would leave by the same window he had entered, or at least from the same side of the building. The house opposite had a rather grand portico and so there I sat, leaning my back against the wall and hidden from the school by one of the pillars.

I suspect I may have dozed off, but it felt like only seconds later that I was being challenged, in heavily accented Russian, by the commanding officer of a small squad of French troops.

'What are you doing here?' he barked.

'Sleeping, sir!' I leapt to my feet in an effort to show respect, but I realized that if I wasn't careful, I might betray my military background.

'Don't you have a home?' As the lieutenant spoke, I noticed behind him the window of the school across the street swing open once again.

'It's been occupied, sir,' I replied, trying not to look at the window and thereby betray Foma, 'by your compatriots.'

'And where was that?'

This was a tricky question. I tried to recall somewhere close by where I had seen French soldiers billeted.

'Kolpachny Lane, sir.' Behind him, the figure of Foma slipped to the ground, not quite jumping, not quite climbing; flowing – slower than water but faster than honey – like blood. He passed across the wall as the shadow of a stationary object cast by a moving light.

'I see,' continued the officer. It looked like he believed me and had some sympathy for my predicament. 'But I can't help that. The men have to sleep somewhere.'

I nodded. Foma walked silently away down the street, almost swaggering compared to his earlier furtive gait, as if proud of what he had achieved within the temporary barracks. Whether he glanced over towards me and the French soldier, I don't know. Even if he had, he may not have recognized me. He certainly made no action to come to my assistance.

'I have to sleep somewhere too,' I told the lieutenant, trying not to appear so submissive that I might arouse suspicion.

'That's as may be, but you can't sleep here. That's a barracks over there.' He glanced over his shoulder, but Foma had already vanished into the night. 'We can't have the natives loitering around here.'

'I'm sorry, sir,' I said. Anger began to well up inside me as he spoke, particularly at dismissive words such as 'native', but it was not the anger of Captain Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov – he understood that this was just the bluster of a frightened junior officer in a foreign country. It was the anger of the homeless Russian butler that I had become, much as I always became whoever I had to pretend to be. It would not convince this lieutenant if the Muscovite before him simply stayed calm. I had to stay calm, but to do so in spite of myself, and make it clear to him that I was angry and urgently containing myself so as not to show it. So many layers of deception are too difficult to juggle. It is better simply to believe it oneself, then one cannot be doubted by any man.