Andrew Williams - To Kill a Tsar

‘To Alexander Soloviev. To our comrades in prison, to “The People’s Will” and to our revolution.’

As Hadfield raised his glass with the rest, he could sense Alexander’s sharp little eyes upon him, and he made a point of holding his gaze. He was heavier than Hadfield remembered him, his fine frock coat stretched tightly across his chest, that rarest of men, a plump revolutionary. He saluted Hadfield very deliberately with his glass before someone plucked at his sleeve and he was obliged to look away.

The new year ticked on into the early hours. Anna showed no inclination to leave. ‘No doubt you believe it your duty to be with your comrades even to the end of a party?’ Hadfield risked teasing her. Anna gave a little frown, but the corners of her mouth twitched as she struggled to suppress a smile. A woman called Olga suggested a séance and a large sheet of paper was conjured up from somewhere, the letters of the alphabet written around its edge.

‘No one believes in this superstitious nonsense, do they?’ he whispered to Anna.

‘I do,’ she said crossly.

‘But I thought you were an atheist.’

‘I am.’

‘But you believe in this?’

‘I don’t know. Yes, a little.’

They took their places at the table, a saucer upside down on the paper, and by the light of a flickering candle they tried to summon the spirit of Tsar Nicholas.

‘We must ask him how his grandson will die,’ Olga whispered.

‘Why do we want to spoil our new year by inviting an old tyrant to join us?’ asked Zhelyabov.

Olga hissed at him to be quiet. ‘How will Alexander meet his death? How will the tsar meet his death?’ she intoned.

The saucer began to move, dragging Hadfield’s forefinger across the table. The whole thing seemed not only ridiculous but in very poor taste, and he was grateful for the anonymity of darkness. For ten minutes the saucer glided meaninglessly about the table as if struggling to find a common will and then it moved to ‘P’ and ‘O’ and the letter ‘I’ in front of Hadfield, then to ‘S’ and to ‘O’ again, and finally ‘N’. POISON.

‘But that’s impossible!’ said Olga.

Hadfield could not help smiling: how very ‘old Russia’.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ said someone else. No one at the table believed the tsar would die from poisoning because it was not a weapon the executive committee of The People’s Will would ever approve.

Zhelyabov tried to laugh it off: ‘What can we expect from such nonsense?’ But it seemed to Hadfield that instead of raising spirits the séance had only succeeded in dampening them.

‘It’s almost three o’clock. We must leave,’ Alexander said from the darkness beyond the table. ‘But first — the Marseillaise .’

‘Do you know the words, Doctor?’ asked Sophia Perovskaya.

Yes, Hadfield knew the words well and he joined with the singing, softly and cautiously, lest the neighbours heard their call to arms. But he was conscious of Anna silent beside him, shifting uncomfortably, the revolutionary from the village who did not know the words to a socialist anthem but believed spirits could be summoned to a drunken table. And he felt a warm surge of love for her difference and reached for her hand.

They left the party in pairs and threes to avoid the unwelcome attention of the street superintendent, and at last he was alone with her. As soon as he could he pulled her into the shadow of a yard and bent to kiss her tenderly. ‘Happy New Year, my darling’.

‘Am I your darling?’

‘How can you doubt it?’

They spent the rest of the night wrapped in each other’s arms on the mattress in the old Ukrainian woman’s cell. There had been other women in Switzerland and London but none that had touched him like Anna. She was always with him, every minute, every second, at the core of his being. It troubled him that he could not understand why it was so. There was a darkness in her, fragility, confusion, a stubbornness beyond reason. What was it she felt for him? She did not say, and he wondered if she knew. She was capable of slipping from submissiveness to defiance and intemperate anger in little more than the blink of an eye. And yet there was a femininity and subtle intelligence there, too, that was deeply attractive. Lying beside her, the early sun dropping down the wall opposite, Hadfield knew that for better or worse their fates were bound together — and that this new year marked a new phase in his life.

‘…The Minister of Justice has agreed to an amnesty for your comrades.’

The little man with the wispy red hair and goatee beard nodded his head calmly, but beneath the table his hands were wrestling anxiously with a pencil. He was dressed in prison greys several sizes too large, his head and shoulders hunched forward as if cowering from an invisible presence. Perhaps it was the ghost of his irascible father — he had spoken of him often to Dobrshinsky in the course of their conversations — or the rough Jew-hating neighbours of his childhood in Kiev. Perhaps he was bent by guilt and the long shadow of Alexander Mikhailov, or by exhaustion, his senses blunted after days in the interrogation room, coaxed and cajoled, his illusions stripped from him one by one.

‘And I have your word,’ Goldenberg said at last. ‘I have your word they will be safe? If even one hair on the head of a comrade is hurt, I’ll never forgive myself.’

‘You know I respect your cause. I admire your courage. We trust each other. Here…’ The chief investigator picked up the vodka bottle on the table between them and poured a little into two small glasses. ‘To reconciliation. To reform. To a new year for Russia and an end to confusion,’ he said, raising his own in salute. Then, turning to the clerk at the table in the corner of the interrogation room, ‘The last few sentences.’

The young clerk ran his forefinger along the page of his open log book: ‘… discussed my idea for the assassination of the emperor with Alexander Mikhailov and others …’

‘A group of us met and we—’

‘Who?’

‘Mikhailov, a Pole called Kobilianski, Kviatkovsky, Zunderlich, Soloviev…’

‘Anna Kovalenko?’

‘Yes. I wanted to do it and the Pole volunteered too, but Mikhailov said the tsar should be killed by a Russian — not a Pole or a Jew. So Alexander Soloviev agreed to do it and I helped him prepare.’

Dobrshinsky gave a little nod.

‘But I wouldn’t have missed,’ said Goldenberg with sudden passion.

‘And Anna Kovalenko — she was there with Soloviev in the square?’

Goldenberg licked his lips, then, lifting his right hand to them, began biting at his thumb nail. So vain, so weak, so anxious for praise and attention, Dobrshinsky wondered how a clever man like Mikhailov had made such a mistake.

‘I must know the truth to bring this to an end as we agreed,’ he said quietly, leaning forward at the table in an effort to hold eye contact with the prisoner.