Sam Eastland: Red Icon

And then the Tsar was calling his name.

Pekkala leaned around the corner. ‘Majesty?’

The Tsar beckoned to him. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘You will never see the likes of this again.’

The Tsarina, who had been greeting the throng with both hands raised above her head, saw a movement from the corner of her eye and turned, just as Pekkala stepped cautiously out on to the balcony. ‘What are you doing here?’ she snapped. ‘Get back inside with the others. Get back where you belong!’

‘He is not one of the others,’ said the Tsar, ‘and he is here because I asked him to be.’

For a moment, the Tsarina stared angrily at her husband. Then she turned abruptly and resumed waving to the people below. Pekkala looked out at the thousands of faces, like pink cat licks dappling a summer-clothing sea of browns and reds and blues and whites. Then his gaze wandered to the Tsarina.

He wondered how she must feel, being forced to celebrate this declaration of war against her own people and knowing that, no matter what happened in the months ahead, all allegiance to her adopted Russia would be doubted and dismissed.

The Tsar, by now, was completely swept up in the exhilaration of the moment. ‘Do you see, Pekkala?’ he shouted, struggling to make himself heard over the crowd, which had pressed forward against a line of policemen, whose linked arms strained to hold them back. ‘The spirit of the Russian people is unconquerable! With their faith in me and mine in them, we will bring a peace to this country that will last a thousand years! Nothing can defeat us! Not while we are guided by The Shepherd !’ He leaned across, resting his hand upon Pekkala’s. ‘And while the icon is looking after Russia, you will be looking after me!’

*

For a young man named Stefan Kohl, far to the east of Petrograd in a tiny village called Rosenheim, a war had already begun.

His family came from a long line of German farmers who had been invited by Catherine the Great, herself originally a German, to settle on the rich farmland near the river Volga. Beginning in the late 1700s, many such families arrived and were soon planting crops of wheat and rye in the Volga region’s black and fertile soil. They prospered and, although they were subjects of Russia, the Volga Germans kept their heritage intact.

But not all of the inhabitants of Rosenheim considered this cultural stubbornness to be a good idea.

Instead of the local school, where only German was spoken and the classes were so small that students of all ages were lumped together in the same rooms, Stefan’s father, Viktor Kohl, a Lutheran minister, sent his sons to the Russian school in the nearby town of Krasnoyar.

In Krasnoyar, the Kohl brothers were singled out for bullying, the result not only of their refusal to abandon their heritage but also of the lingering memory of the preferential treatment they had received when they first immigrated to Russia.

Stefan’s older brother, Emil, survived at the school by making himself as inconspicuous as possible, and by submitting so completely to the ridicule and torment of the bullies that they could find no sport in it, and eventually left him alone. Lacking the same instincts of self-preservation, Stefan was beaten so frequently that it became a rite of passage for Russian boys at the school to pick a fight with him.

The last of these scraps occurred between Stefan and a boy named Vyachyslav Konovalov. He was a slight and inoffensive young man, who would never have gone looking for trouble, least of all with the tall and powerful German, if he had not been goaded into it by his Russian classmates. Anxious to prove himself, Konovalov simply walked up to Stefan in the playground and took a swing at him.

Stefan, by now so used to these unprovoked attacks that nothing ever caught him by surprise, stepped back as Konovalov’s fist swept harmlessly past his face. Then, using the momentum of Konovalov’s swing to set him off balance, Stefan took hold of the boy’s arm, turned him sideways and landed a punch of his own. Stefan had been aiming to hit Konovalov in the jaw but as Konovalov spun around he lost his footing and began to fall. Stefan’s blow missed Konovalov’s jaw and struck him in the throat, causing a haemorrhage of the occipital vein. Konovalov dropped to the ground and immediately began coughing up blood. He was rushed to the hospital and, for a while, his life hung in the balance. Even though Konovalov eventually recovered from his injury, the sight of him retching up gore in the playground was too much for the school and Stefan was expelled.

Viktor Kohl, who had been anxious to improve ties with the nearby Russian community, was so shamed by his son’s dismissal that he refused to transfer Stefan to the local school in Rosenheim. Instead, he handed the boy, then aged fifteen, over to the local butcher, a leviathan of a man named Werner Grob, to be trained in a profession in which, he felt, the boy’s inherent violence might find some respectable outlet.

Emil, meanwhile, graduated from the school at Krasnoyar and won a scholarship to study at the University of Kiev. Although he did not bear the scars of the beatings which his brother had endured, Emil had not escaped unscathed. The time he spent at school in Krasnoyar had left him deeply troubled from having lived so long in constant fear. Emil found it difficult, if not impossible, to set aside his mental barricades. As a result, he made few friends and retreated increasingly into the world of his studies, where numbers and equations became the only things on which he felt he could truly rely.

His parents understood very little of Emil’s work, or of the effect it was having on him. In their eyes, as the first university-educated member of the family, Emil could do no wrong.

Meanwhile, Stefan continued his apprenticeship with Werner Grob, the butcher. Grob was a sensible, competent and monosyllabic man. He proved a good mentor to the boy, who had been all but disowned by his family.

Once a week, Stefan and Grob loaded up their butcher’s cart and rode to the marketplace at Krasnoyar, where Grob had a good reputation.

At first, Stefan had been nervous about returning to Krasnoyar, but he was surprised, and profoundly relieved, to hear none of the jeering or the angry voices which had followed him through his schooling. Instead, customers barely looked him in the eye as he stood among the hanging carcasses of pigs, chickens and sheep, blood-smeared hands heaving severed hearts, tongues and kidneys on to the scale to be weighed.

What Stefan did not realise was that people were afraid of him. He was no longer someone to be picked on with impunity by anyone who wished to try their luck. The boy they had once known was quickly growing into a man who, the inhabitants of Krasnoyar were quick to realise, would be unlikely to forget the cruelty they had shown to him.

In the months that followed, as Stefan learned his trade, he began to resign himself to the possibility that he belonged in the bloody apron of a butcher. But he was lonely, and frustrated by the way that his life was turning out. Some nights, as he lay in bed, listening to his father snoring down the hall and knowing he was barely welcome in his parents’ house, a gaping emptiness would open in his heart.

After a year as the butcher’s apprentice, Stefan was sometimes allowed to go alone to Krasnoyar on market day. On that same hot August afternoon that the Tsar declared war against Germany, a fact of which no one in Rosenheim was yet aware, Stefan was returning home when his horse shied away from something lying in the ditch. Bringing the cart to a halt, Stefan set the brake and climbed down to see what had startled the animal. What he found was a man, clothed in little more than rags and so bruised about the face that at first he appeared to be dead. But as Stefan dragged the body from the ditch, ready to bring it to the undertaker, the stranger opened his eyes.