Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

The lines cut through Piatakov’s thoughts. He felt for a moment as if Esenin were addressing him and only him, but the poet was in his own world, eyes glazed, feet unsteady, the foggy voice making common cause with the smoke that hung in the air.

The voice went on, seemingly for hours, and when the last line faded away it felt like all the poet’s listeners were waking from a common dream. Esenin’s spell had bound them together, and in its dissolution a feeling of intense sadness gripped Piatakov, a sense of limitless waste.

Piatakov looked at Shahumian and Grazhin, and knew what they were feeling. At heart they were still the same.

But they weren’t, Piatakov thought, not really. None of them were.

Grazhin was ordering vodka for everyone.

“Let me tell you what we’re planning,” Brady said quietly.

She was still asleep whenPiatakov got back to their room, the candle still burning on the chair beside their bed. He had told her often enough that one day she’d burn down the building and everyone in it, including herself. But here she was again, fast asleep with a guttering flame, work papers rather than sheets covering her body.

She looked as lovely as ever, he thought. He sat down, pulled off his boots, and stared at her sleeping face, remembered their first meeting in Petrograd, more than three years before. He’d been one of the sailors organizing Dybenko and Kollontai’s wedding ride on the city’s frozen roller coaster, and they had ended up sharing a droshky and one of the thawed-out cars. She had seemed so exotic, this foreign comrade with chestnut-brown hair and the greenest of eyes, a woman who came from so far away and yet spoke the language of their revolution, and who seemed as much in love with it as any of its makers.

He remembered the first time they’d made love, on one of his furloughs from the front, in the room she’d shared on Kalashni Lane. He could still see her face in the soft candle glow, the joyous shock of their coming together. Had he ever felt happier? He didn’t think so.

So how had it all gone wrong? Was it his fault or hers, or were they just another casualty of civil war? And if it was the latter, why had they—why had he—let things they knew they couldn’t control slowly push them apart?

Or had he just been imagining a future that was never on offer? Sometimes he was sure she loved him, at others certain she didn’t. And on those rare occasions when he’d swallowed his pride and sought reassurance, she’d usually quoted her friend Kollontai at him, stuff about love and relationships that sounded like sense but left him as unsure as ever about how she really felt. Maybe she didn’t know, or simply didn’t want to.

It didn’t matter anymore. He knew that even as he sat there, looking at her, loving her. It wasn’t politics that had come between them; it was who they were, and how their hearts and minds had pulled them in different directions.

As if on cue, the candle gutted out.

“I’d like some advice onwhat to do next,” Caitlin said. She, Fanya Zenzinova, and Alexandra Kollontai were sitting in the second-floor room of the Zhenotdel offices, the one usually used for internal meetings. Everyone else had gone home, but the sun was still above the rooftops, bathing the walls in golden light. “How much do you remember?” Caitlin asked Kollontai.

“Assume nothing,” Kollontai said. “I’ve had a lot on my plate these last few weeks,” she added apologetically.

Her friend and boss was still under strain, Caitlin thought. The recently concluded International Women’s Conference, which had raised everyone else’s spirits at the Zhenotdel, had offered Kollontai only a temporary respite. And here was another burden to shoulder.

“Anna Nemtseva is a young woman from Orel,” Caitlin began. “She turned up here about six weeks ago to report a crime. A series of them in fact. Crimes that no one else would take seriously. Anna was one of two Zhenotdel officials who ran our office in Orel. She is married, and in April this year her husband—also a party member—was suddenly arrested for ‘speculation.’ Meaning he had bought something on the black market.”

“Since March and the NEP, the whole of Russia has been one big market,” Kollontai protested.

“Maybe Orel was still catching up,” Caitlin suggested. “It doesn’t matter, because whether or not he did anything illegal, nearly everyone in Russia has committed the same sort of crime over the last couple of years. They arrested Anna’s husband because the local party boss—a man named Agranov—had decided he wanted to sleep with Anna. The day after the arrest, she was called in to the local party office. There was no beating about the bush—if she spent that night with the party boss, her husband would be released on the following morning. She spent the day agonizing, decided she really had no choice, and agreed on condition that her husband would never find out.

“Agranov was rough with her, but her husband was released, and she tried to put it all behind her. But then another young woman, utterly distraught, came to the Zhenotdel office with a similar story to tell. And she, in turn, knew of two others who had been through the same nightmare. So Anna reported Agranov to the local Cheka. She was reluctant to mention her own experience—she was still afraid her husband would find out—or to name the other women, for fear that might put them or their husbands in jeopardy, but she was bracing herself to come clean if she got a sympathetic hearing. She didn’t. The local chairman told her the women concerned must be no better than prostitutes and that, if she persisted in defaming a party official, he would have her and her husband arrested for counterrevolutionary activity.

“She thought about it for several days, and decided she couldn’t live with herself if she just kept silent. Since the Chekist had also threatened her husband, she decided she had to tell him the whole story. He was horrified, but not in the way she expected. He more or less called her a slut and forbade her from pursuing the matter.”

Kollontai rolled her eyes. “For heaven’s sake!”

“This story doesn’t paint our male comrades in the best of lights,” Caitlin noted wryly. “Anyway, Anna thought, ‘The hell with him,’ took the train to Moscow, and turned up at our door. After she’d told her story, and we’d checked it as best we could, I took it to the Orgbureau. The members spared me the usual litany of objections and excuses and appeals for greater clarity—Molotov even admitted to being shocked—and promised immediate action. That was five weeks ago, and absolutely nothing has been done. Agranov is still in charge of Orel.”

“Where’s Anna Nemtseva?” Kollontai asked.

“She’s staying at the house on Povarskaya,” Fanya told her. “She wants to go back to Orel and her Zhenotdel work, but of course she can’t. Not while Agranov and his Cheka friends are still in control of the town.”

“And she’s pregnant,” Caitlin added. “By either her husband or Agranov—she doesn’t know which.”

“Oh hell,” Kollontai said with a sigh. “I’d love to think this was an exceptional case, but…” She shook her head. “Leave it with me for a few days. I’ll try and find out why nothing’s been done.” She glanced across at the clock on the wall. “I have to be at another meeting,” she said, getting up. “It looks like this man, Agranov, has some influential friends in Moscow. If I find out who they are, we can take things from there.” She paused in the doorway. “And I’ll go to Vladimir Ilych if necessary—he still listens to me on issues like this.”