David Dickinson - Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

Nonetheless he thought he had the hang of the main points of the story. The Cherry Orchard belonged to a Mrs Ranevskaya who is returning home from Paris at the beginning of the play. The estate and the Cherry Orchard will have to be sold to pay off the family debts unless she agrees to cut all the trees down and build villas for the new middle class on the site of the orchard and live off the rental income. A local merchant, risen from the ranks of the former peasants, offers to help her do this, but she refuses. There are two of her daughters, one adopted, and her brother in the cast, all going to be affected by the sale. There is an aged servant called Firs who regrets the passing of the old days of the serfs when everybody knew their place. There is a perpetual student called Trofimov who boasts of not being thirty yet. All of these characters, Powerscourt felt, were out of place. They didn’t seem to belong to their own time, to their own space. They were displaced persons in what had become, for them, almost a foreign country. They floated precariously between the old world of the Ranevskaya estate and the different world they would inhabit when it was gone. Very near the end the stage was empty, with the sound of all the doors being locked with their keys, and all the carriages leaving. The silence was broken by the striking of a solitary axe against a tree, a rather melancholy sound. The old servant appears. He has been forgotten, left behind. Suddenly Powerscourt felt very strongly that the Cherry Orchard, for Chekhov, was Russia. The old order of long ago, of masters and serfs, has long gone. Nobody is sure what is going to replace it. Russia is being sold off to the new capitalist class, who will cut down the cherry orchards and build the villas while the previous owners complete their abdication of responsibility by going back to their lovers in Paris.

‘Life has gone by as if I hadn’t lived,’ says the eighty-seven-year-old Firs at the very end, ‘you’ve got no strength left, nothing, nothing.’ There is the distant sound of a string breaking, as if in the sky, a dying melancholy noise. Silence falls and the only thing to be heard is a tree being struck again with an axe far off in the orchard. The final curtain falls. The old order is being cut down. Powerscourt wondered what Dr Chekhov would have made of Bloody Sunday and the current paralysis in his country. Would he have any prescriptions? Or would he be content to describe the symptoms?

‘Can you tell me one thing, Lord Powerscourt?’ Natasha Bobrinsky and her young man Mikhail and Lord Francis Powerscourt were waiting for coffee at the end of their dinner in the Alexander Hotel halfway along the Nevskii Prospekt. Their table was hidden away at the end of the dining hall, decorated like a London club, a rather expensive club with valuable paintings all over the walls. To their right a small orchestra could be heard tuning up for the dancing which was due to commence in fifteen minutes. Two servants were lighting enormous candles on the walls of the ballroom.

‘Of course, Natasha, whatever you like,’ said Powerscourt.

‘Well,’ said the girl, leaning forward to address Powerscourt more closely, speaking in her near perfect French, ‘I think I understand most of what has been going on when I’ve not been there. Mikhail told me all about the wicked Major and what happened to him and what happened to Mr Martin and I think you were all very brave about that. I know about the little boy.’ She paused briefly to look at a couple of violinists making their way towards the stage, tugging vaguely at their instruments. Powerscourt was impressed that she had chosen not to name the disease.

‘But there are two things I don’t understand.’ Her long fingers began tapping out some unknown musical beat on the white linen tablecloth. Waltz? wondered Powerscourt. Foxtrot? Mazurka? He suddenly remembered Natasha’s grandmother in that great bed, humming her way through the dances of her youth, trying to salvage Martin’s name from the depths of her memory. ‘Why didn’t Mr Martin tell Tamara Kerenkova he was coming? He’d always told her before.’

‘I’m not absolutely sure about that,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘but remember, the previous times he came he wasn’t working, if you see what I mean. He wasn’t representing Great Britain or the Foreign Office, just himself. This time he was on business, very important business, and the Prime Minister must have told him he couldn’t even tell the church mouse a thing about it. I think Kerenkov knew Martin was coming because the Okhrana read the telegrams from the Foreign Office giving the date of his arrival and told Kerenkov about it in some ploy of their own.’

Natasha Bobrinsky nodded. ‘I see. My second question has to do with that meeting. How did you work out what happened between the Tsar and Mr Martin? How did you know that there was a plan to send the family to England?’

Powerscourt smiled. It was difficult not to smile at Natasha, she looked so pretty this evening. ‘Part of the answer lies in the information you brought from the Alexander Palace, Natasha.’ He paused while a waiter arrived with a tray of coffee. ‘I think it really started when I tried to analyse what had happened already. Mr Martin had been sent from London on a mission of some kind. Our Foreign Office knew nothing about it. Our Ambassador here knew nothing about it. Why? If it was something routine like a treaty with all kinds of clauses and things, the diplomats would all have been involved. Nothing they like better than criticizing each other’s drafts and correcting the Ambassador’s spelling. But no. Therefore it probably wasn’t a treaty. But what was it? And why had somebody been killed? Was it because of what they said or what they refused to say? Then there were the words you overheard the Tsar saying to his wife about how many dead members of their own family did she want to have before she followed the path of the dead Martin. If you think about it that means there is a way to keep the family alive, Martin’s way, which must involve them not being in St Petersburg at all. When you mentioned to Mikhail about the Trans-Siberian Railway egg having disappeared, I didn’t think very much of it at first. Gone to be cleaned perhaps, clockwork engine needs a service. But then you said that some other toys had gone and that Alexis was very devoted to the railway egg. I thought of the French Revolution and the whole royal party trying to escape from their semi-imprisonment in the Tuileries in 1791, only to be recaptured at Varennes the following day. The toys were sent ahead so the children, and especially the little boy, wouldn’t feel so homesick when they were moved. A British frigate has been on patrol in the Gulf of Finland now for weeks waiting to take them all off. Surely in terrible times it would only be natural for any royal household to think of getting their women and children out before it may be too late. But that knowledge would be dynamite in today’s Russia. The Tsar is sending his family away! He’s deserting his people! It could have meant the beginning of the end of the Romanovs. Maybe those security agencies like Major Shatilov’s suspected something of the sort was afoot, some plot to send Alexandra and the children away. It must, as you know better than I, Natasha, be very difficult to keep anything secret in that palace. That’s why they were so keen to know what happened between the Tsar and Martin and between me and the Tsar. The information was so important they were prepared, quite literally to kill for it. Twice.’

Powerscourt paused and poured himself a cup of black coffee. The orchestra was tuning up, the first enthusiastic dancers beginning to form up on the floor.

‘Why England?’ asked Natasha. ‘Why not Sweden or somewhere closer?’