Boris Akunin - The State Counsellor

On Sunday morning the alarm bell sounded in the Orthodox quarter on the other side of the river, where the goys lived. The community had sent their tavern-keeper, Mitrii Kuzmich, to Belotserkovsk on a special errand and he had returned, bringing confirmation that the rumours were true: the Emperor-Tsar had been killed by Yids - which meant you could give the sheenies a good beating with no fear of the consequences.

The crowd set off across the railway bridge that divided the little town into two parts, Orthodox and Jewish. They walked in a calm, orderly fashion, carrying church banners and singing. When they were met by representatives of the other community - the rabbi, the director of the Jewish college and the market warden - they did nothing to them, but they did not listen to them either. They simply pushed them aside and spread out through the quiet, narrow streets where the closed shutters stared at them blindly. They spent a long time wondering where to start, waiting for the impulse they needed to unlock the doors of their souls.

The tavern-keeper himself set things moving: he stove in the door of a tavern that had opened the previous year and ruined his trade. The crashing and clattering dispelled the people's lethargy, and put them in the right mood.

Everything happened just the way it was supposed to: they fired the synagogue, rummaged through the little houses, broke a few men's ribs, dragged a few around by their sidelocks and in the evening, when the barrels of wine hidden in the tavern's cellar were discovered, some of the lads even got their hands on the Yids' young wenches.

It was still light as they made their way back, bearing off their bales of plunder and drunks. Before they dispersed, the whole community decided not to work the next day, because it was a sin to work when the people were grieving so badly, but to go across the river again.

When Green came back that evening the little town was unrecognisable: broken doors, feathers and fluff drifting in the air, a smell of smoke and from the windows the sound of women wailing and children crying.

His parents had survived by sitting it out in the stone cellar, but the house was in an appalling state: the anti-Semites had smashed more than they had taken, and they had dealt most viciously of all with the books - in their furious zeal they had torn the pages out of all five hundred volumes.

Green found the sight of his father's white face and trembling lips unbearable. His father told him that the pharmacy had been ransacked in the morning, because there was medical alcohol there. But that was not the most terrible thing. They had smashed in the old tsaddik Belkin's head, and he had died, and because the cobbler's wife Gesa refused to give them her daughter, they had chopped away half of her face with an axe. The next day the mob would come again. The people had collected together nine hundred and fifty roubles and taken the money to the district police officer and the police officer had taken it, saying he would go to fetch a troop of armed men, and left, but he would not be back before the following morning, so they would have to endure yet more suffering.

As Green listened, he blanched in his terrible mortification. Was this what fate had been preparing him for? - not a blinding flash erupting from beneath the wheels of a gilded carriage with a thunderclap that would echo round the world, but a senseless death under the cudgels of a drunken rabble? - In a remote backwater, for the sake of wretched people in whom he felt no interest, with whom he had nothing in common? He couldn't even understand their hideous dialect properly, because he had always spoken Russian at home. Their customs seemed savage and absurd to him, and he himself was a stranger to them, the half-crazy son of a Jew who hadn't wanted to live like a Jew (and what, I ask you, had come of that?).

But the stupidity and malice of the world demanded retaliation, and Green knew that he had no choice.

In the morning the bell sounded again in the goys' quarter and a dense crowd, more numerous than the previous day's, set off from the marketplace towards the bridge. They weren't singing today. After the wine from the tavern and the neat alcohol from the pharmacy, they were bleary-eyed, but still brisk and determined. Many of them were dragging along trolleys and wheelbarrows. Walking at the front with an icon in his hands was the man of the moment, Mitrii Kuzmich, wearing a red shirt and a new knee-length coat of good-quality cloth.

Stepping on to the bridge, the crowd stretched out into a grey ribbon. On the river below porous ice floes drifted downstream, another unstoppable mass of grey.

Standing in the middle of the rails at the far end of the bridge was a tall young Yid with the collar of his coat turned up. He had his hands in his pockets and the sullen wind was tousling the black hair on his hatless head.

The men at the front drew closer and the young Yid took his right hand out of his pocket without saying a word. The hand was holding a heavy, black revolver.

The men at the front stopped, but those at the back could not see the revolver; they pressed forward, and the crowd kept moving at the same speed.

Then the dark-haired man fired over their heads. The report boomed hollowly in the clear morning air and the river took it up eagerly, echoing it over and over again: Cra-ack! Cra-ack! Cra-ack!

The crowd stopped.

The dark-haired man still did not speak - his face was serious and still. The black circle of the revolver's muzzle moved lower, staring straight into the eyes of those standing at the front.

Egorsha the carpenter, an unruly and dissolute man, worked furiously with his elbows as he squeezed his way through the crowd. He had spent the whole previous day lying in a drunken stupor and had not gone to beat the Yids, so now he was burning up with impatience.

'Come on, come on,' said Egorsha, laughing and pushing up the sleeve of his tattered coat. 'Don't you worry; he won't fire; he won't dare.'

The revolver immediately replied to Egorsha's words with a loud crack and blue smoke.

The carpenter gasped, clutching at his wounded shoulder and squatting down on his haunches, and the black barrel barked another four times at regular intervals.

Now there were no more bullets in the cylinder, and Green took a home-made bomb out of his left pocket. But he did not need to throw it because Mitrii Kuzmich, wounded in the knee, began howling so terribly - 'Oh, oh, they've killed me, they've killed me, good Orthodox believers!' - that the crowd shuddered and pressed back and then set off at a run, with men trampling each other, back across the bridge into the Orthodox quarter.

As he watched the backs of the fleeing men, Green felt for the first time that there was very little sky-blue left in him. His dominant colour was steel-grey now.

At twilight the district police officer arrived with a platoon of mounted police and was surprised to see that all was quiet in the little town. He spoke with the Jews first and then took the pharmacist's son away to jail.

Grigory Grinberg became Green at the age of twenty, after one of his repeated escapes. He had walked one and a half thousand versts and then, just outside Tobolsk, been caught in a stupid police raid on tramps. He had had to give some kind of name, and that was what he called himself - not in memory of his old surname, but in honour of Ignatii Grinevitsky, who had killed the Tsar.

At the one thousand eight hundredth heartbeat he felt that his strength was fully restored and got lightly to his feet, without touching the floor with his hands. He had a lot of time. It was evening now; there was the whole night ahead.

He did not know how long he would have to spend in Moscow.

Probably about two weeks at least. Until they took the plainclothes police agents off the turnpikes and the railway stations. Green was not concerned for himself; he had plenty of patience. Eight months of solitary confinement was good training for that. But the lads in the group were young and hot-headed; it would be hard for them.