Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

They climbed down and walked a few yards from the train. The desert stretched darkly away, the receding curves of the dunes like an ocean of sleeping giants. In the sky above, the Milky Way floated like a jeweled veil.

All down the train, people were getting out to stretch their legs. She considered putting her arm through his but decided it wasn’t a good idea.

“Tell me about your husband,” he said, denting her sense of well-being.

“What would like to know?” she asked, more brusquely than she intended.

“How did you meet?”

“I met him first at Kollontai’s wedding, at the beginning of 1918. But we didn’t… didn’t become lovers until the spring of 1919, a long time after you and I… And we didn’t see much of each other—I was in Moscow, and he spent most of his time away at the front.”

“Why did you get married?”

“He wanted to. I was never sure why, and I don’t think he was either.”

“I see.”

No you don’t, she thought. “It was part of the war,” she said, feeling she owed him some sort of explanation. “Most people called them ‘comrades’ marriages’; Kollontai’s phrase was ‘erotic friendships.’ People who liked each other sharing a bed, without thinking too far into the future.”

“Ah.”

“What about you? Have you married again?”

“No.” He hesitated. “I was with someone for a while. It sort of started by accident and lasted a few months.”

She was surprised that hearing this hurt and more than a little disappointed in herself. “So what else have you been doing with yourself?” she asked lightly.

“Repairing automobiles. Converting some for disabled veterans. And I’ve just spent a few months in prison.”

“What for?”

“Knocking a policeman over.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

“It’s a long story. Next time we have an hour to spare…”

“How’s your mother?”

“Flourishing, despite everything.”

“I was sorry to hear about Jed,” she said. Jack’s brother had been dead for almost three years, which seemed a long time to delay her condolences. She dragged herself back to the present and asked him what he thought of Komarov’s chances of catching Brady and Sergei.

“Not bad, I’d say. I don’t know about your husband or the Armenian, but Brady and the Indians should stick out like sore thumbs in Turkestan, and there must be a lot of Cheka offices between Tashkent and the border.”

“Yes,” she agreed. She no longer knew whether Sergei’s capture would relieve or dismay her.

“I suppose you’ll be returning to Moscow the moment this is over,” McColl said.

“Of course,” she replied automatically.

McColl advanced his second pawnand took a large sip of vodka. Caitlin had retired for the night, and Arbatov had recently discovered that one of the women traveling alone was also bound for Verny. Maslov was probably polishing buttons or boots.

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Komarov asked.

“No, none,” McColl replied, instantly on guard.

“I had a brother,” the Russian said. “He was older than me, three years older. He joined the navy in 1900, and we celebrated his commission and the centenary with a single party.” He smiled wryly. “Which felt ironic even then.”

“What did?”

“Oh, all that stuff about the new century: the fresh start, the new man, peace between nations. All of it. And there we were happily assuming that the military offered the brightest of futures.”

“What happened to your brother?” McColl asked two moves later.

“Vassily went down with his ship at Tsushima. I was twenty then, and my father expected me to follow my brother’s example. But I refused. Not for political reasons or none that I’d consciously worked out. As you no doubt remember, when the Japanese War ended the military’s prestige was lower than ever. I was a student at the time, a law student in Moscow, and the last thing I wanted to do was fight for the czar. People used to assume that all law students were reactionaries, but in most cases the reverse was true, and for good reason. It’s only in countries like England and America that lawyers make money, because there the law has an empire of its own, independent from the state. We had no such expectations, and most of us were constitutionalists, dreaming of parliaments and bourgeois democracy.”

He paused to bring out a knight. “Fortunately I failed my law exams. There was too much to learn, and I had too many other interests—politics, women, playing cards. Rural property law couldn’t compete. So, I became a policeman. A friend of my father’s secured me a post at the Moscow Investigation Department, and rather to my surprise, I found myself loving the work. There was something different every day, and it was always interesting.”

“Then how…?”

Komarov poured them each another couple of inches. “How did I get from there to the deputy chairmanship of the M-Cheka? Well, I’d always been politically minded—my mother once told me how enraged I’d been as a four year old when we found ourselves watching a column of men in chains on their way into exile. In my first year as an investigator, I was just a problem solver, and quite a good one, if I say so myself. But if that’s all a city policeman does, he ends up holding his nose. There are no men better placed to understand a society than those that police it and no men more wary of radical change because they know they’ll be in the front line when the bombs and bullets start flying. Which is one of the reasons policemen drink a lot,” he added, tipping back the glass of vodka.

“I was made the liaison officer for the Investigation Department’s dealings with the Okhrana,” Komarov continued, “which meant doing the investigative legwork on political cases whenever the Okhrana was overstretched. Which was most of the time after 1905. And I met quite a few of our current leaders over the years, sitting across a table from them in some Moscow station-house basement. It was usually an illuminating experience. Not always—the bourgeoisie has never completely cornered the market in morons—but usually. Most of them were better educated than my law professors, let alone me. I started reading socialist theory so that I could counter their arguments.” Komarov laughed. “I still don’t understand half of it, but I don’t suppose it matters. Arbatov understands everything perfectly—he could quote you the footnotes in all three volumes of Capital —and look what good it’s done him! That was always the trouble with the Mensheviks: they actually believed in a blueprint, a revolution in orderly stages. When reality proved resistant and Lenin had to tear up their precious plan, they all felt personally insulted. They still do.

“Anyway, one night I was working late at the office, and this Okhrana agent walked in through my door. I’d met the man several times and thought him a reactionary bore, so my first thought was that they’d searched my apartment and found some of the forbidden literature that I always had lying around. But no. He said he and his friends had been watching me for some time and asked if I’d consider working for the Bolsheviks. He, it turned out, had been one for years.

“I was astonished, but I didn’t think twice, which was extremely stupid of me. He could have been an agent provocateur, and I should have checked him out first. But I was lucky—he was genuine.

“That was in September 1908, just before the Bosnian Crisis erupted. I went home to my wife, bursting to tell her, but she’d already gone to bed. I sat there looking at her sleeping face, and suddenly realized that I couldn’t ever let her know. She was one of those people who never learn how to dissemble—her face always gave her away. When she discovered, after October, that we were on the winning side, she could hardly believe it.” Komarov sighed. “But she died the next year,” he said eventually. “What about you, Nikolai Matveyevich? Are you married?”