Ian Hocking - The Amber Rooms

Kamo is walking past the railway station in Tiflis. A crowd of workers stand near a derailed locomotive. The huge, metal eyelid of its smokebox is open. The workers look sorry.

Kamo, not stopping, glances into the smokebox. His thoughts have turned to his greater challenge. It has been decided by Lenin, Leonid Krassin, and Soso that Kamo should form a band of expropriators to secure funds for weaponry. Many agents in this fighting unit, or Outfit, will comprise individuals selected for their revolutionary attributes, which Kamo has interpreted as “attractiveness”. They will use their feminine characteristics to infiltrate those circles in which the transfer of State monies is discussed. They will romance State Bank and Treasury employees. Kamo will gather information about the movement of these funds and then take steps to expropriate them. Thus the money for the greater revolution will be deducted from the Tsar’s ration. Nobody in the Party believes the current troubles trigger the inevitable, beautiful revolution. That must wait. These ructions are the clearing of a throat. The money must see the Bolsheviks through coming days when the State will reassert itself.

Kamo smiles. He takes a pistol from his belt and fires it into the smokebox. The sound is futuristic and dreadful. It might be the cry of a mechanical man. One of the workers makes the sign of the cross. Kamo laughs and hurries on to the north-east of the city, where he is due to interrogate the traitor Saakashvili.

A boy runs up to Kamo. He is berry-brown, almost feral, and has a purposeful look in his eye. It is not unusual for Soso to use such boys as messengers. Kamo crouches. His skirted chokha fans out on the packed earth. In the distance, glass breaks.

‘What is your name, brother?’ he asks the boy.

‘You must help her.’

Kamo cocks his head. The boy has not given him a code phrase. ‘Who?’

‘The lady from the forest. She gave me food.’

Kamo stands and walks on.

‘Dmitri!’ calls the boy, jogging alongside him. ‘I am Dmitri!’

‘How old are you, Dmitri?’ asks Kamo. The question is automatic. Kamo has no interest.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Go home to your mother.’

‘The Tsar has her! Twenty men came out of the trees.’

Kamo turns his head to the boy, but does not stop. They pass a burning police wagon.

‘Who? Your mother?’

Dmitri, who is perhaps ten years old, but looks eight, reaches for the nearest of the two pistols that Kamo wears in his belt. Kamo claps his hand over the boy’s. They stop in the street.

The two stare at one another. Kamo is impressed by the fierceness he sees.

‘And how do we know she is not yet dead?’

‘She killed four of them. I saw it. She learned boxing from a Chinaman. It’s all true.’

The boy squints towards the smoke that covers the sun. It is cold. The great snows have not yet come, but they will come soon, and they will fill the cracks in the earth, bury the broken wood, and slow the quickening of the revolution.

While he was being presented to the building superintendents, Kamo occupied himself with thoughts of Saskia. He wanted to kill her. It had been a mistake to attack the boy. Her maternal instincts had been piqued by the gesture, and doubled her strength.

He smiled at an unpleasant-looking man, and screamed, ‘Watch the birdie!’

An urchin followed the man. Kamo felt his fear as though it were an aroma. ‘Down with the Tsar!’ Kamo shouted. If his arms had not been tied, he would have twiddled his moustache. ‘Come on, boys, be wolves, not sheep. Let us murder these cowardly instruments of oppression and take flight. Let the revolution be bloody!’

There was a Security Section case officer in the corner. He was overweight. Kamo had remarked upon this. The officer was sitting at a temporary desk that reminded Kamo of those used in school. The officer had been reading a novel. At Kamo’s outburst, he closed it.

‘Sergeant,’ he said, ‘let’s take a rest from the identification.’

One gendarme ushered away the superintendents who had viewed Kamo. Another halted the line of newcomers at the door. Soon, Kamo was alone with the officer and four gendarmes. This was a different audience entirely. Kamo was still calculating how best to annoy them when two of the gendarmes helped him down from his chair and invited him to sit. As he did so, they pulled off his socks.

The case officer looked at him. ‘Why the performance? It will come to nothing when you are recognised.’

‘My own mother wouldn’t recognise me. At least, not as well as yours would. What a night that was!’

One gendarme offered his truncheon to Kamo’s mouth. Kamo grinned and bit. Then his legs were raised and a second truncheon was whipped across the soles of his feet. His neck twisted and his head snapped back and he gasped. The image of the unlit ceiling lamp fluttered with his eyelids. His tears mixed with his snot, and he wondered if there was some poetry in the strange contrast between this quiet office and the chatter, the telephone buzzers and the tapped typewriters that carried through the cracks in the old walls of this old police station. He fainted.

The Turtle Lake wet a thin slice of the northern slope of Mtatsminda. It was shallow enough to have frozen already. The surrounding woods were colourless with snow. Kamo and the boy found the woman hanging in a tree close to the shore. The boy cried out at the sight. Kamo assessed her death: arms tied back; hatless; unusually good boots. He removed his rifle, which hung across his back, and cocked it. He looked into the trees for the telltale clouds of exhalation.

The boy should not have cried out.

But there was no sign of movement in the trees. They were alone.

He looked at the snow beneath the hanged woman, and saw the traces of her executioners: cigarettes; matches; piss. The tracks led south.

He watched the boy tug at the rope where it had been made fast to an exposed root. Kamo saw something to admire in the ferocity and the desperation. Though the woman was dead, Kamo took a dagger from his belt and passed it to the boy, blade first.

The boy sawed at the rope. He used both hands and all his strength. The rope thrummed.

Kamo turned in a slow circle. He held his rifle in a casual grip. He took a bullet from the lapel of his chokha and pushed it into the corner of his mouth like a cigar.

He did not see the woman fall. The sound was muffled by the deeper snow close to the trunk of the tree. He turned to see her roll lifelessly through the powder until she was face down.

‘Does her heart beat?’ he asked. ‘Quickly, now.’

The boy pushed onto her back. He put his cheek to her chest for a few seconds. When he looked at Kamo, there were no tears. He shook his head.

Brave lad, Kamo thought. Maybe I can use him.

‘Say a prayer for her, if you wish. We will bury her. Then, Dmitri, I will take you to my sisters. They will help you.’

‘I want her to take care of me,’ said Dmitri. His tears were coming now. ‘Not your poxy sisters.’

Kamo sighed. ‘A poet wrote, “Know for certain that once / struck down to the ground, an oppressed man strives again to reach the pure mountain when exalted by hope”. If you don’t understand now, you will soon enough.’

The boy said nothing. They both looked at the woman. Her face was fat and red with death. The rope around her neck was thick, like a fur collar. Her death would have been prolonged. There had been no first drop to her execution. They had hauled her up like a black flag.