Ian Hocking - The Amber Rooms

Mushroom cloud? Is that it?

At once, she understood that the horse radish had contained a deadly fungus called the Destroying Angel.

The Angel of Death.

‘Who are you?’

The sparrows finally tore open the skin of her abdomen. She felt them cram inside. Some beaks snapped up tiny mouthfuls of her blood and spat it into the sky. Others spat new blood. They worked furiously.

She awoke in the bedroom. Once more, she felt that something important had been revealed in her dream, but its nature eluded her. The pain returned, along with a creaking sound. She saw that Grisha was tightening a rope around her forearms. The rope was sticky where it met her skin. Something in the poison had made her bleed and keep bleeding.

Saskia looked up and coughed out dried blood.

‘Robespierre,’ she whispered. Her voice was childlike. ‘I will never look at you again as though I am better.’

Grisha settled on his haunches and began to knot the rope. He smiled.

‘My dear, you’re confusing me with—’

Robespierre’s shot passed through Grisha’s chest below his collar bone. He fell against Saskia. He was still holding the rope, and looked from it to Saskia, as though they were pieces in a puzzle. Robespierre struck Grisha’s head with the butt of the gun, lashing left and right, until Grisha was lying alongside her, bloodied and snorting.

‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Don’t kill him. You’ve done enough.’

‘Yes.’ Robespierre looked at the gun and his red hands. ‘You’re right.’

‘How long until the others arrive?’

‘Minutes. That assumes, of course, that Grisha told the truth. Maybe there is no time at all.’

‘Pick up the gun,’ she said. ‘Will the superintendent “hear” the shot?’

‘He is one of us. I don’t know.’ He looked at the weapon. He was weeping. ‘I guess this is the end of me.’

‘Listen, Robespierre. You’re a good man.’

He crouched by her head. ‘It’s almost dawn,’ he said. ‘They are coming for you. People from the south. Georgians.’

‘What about the Milkman?’

‘I don’t know anything about that. Don’t ask me.’ To himself, he said, ‘I stopped him because this is not right. This should not be about money. Perhaps I don’t have the strength for this.’

‘There is nobody else for me in St Petersburg, Robespierre. Do you understand? If you don’t save me now, nobody will.’

He pressed his hand against his temple. The hand still held the gun. Saskia tried to smile.

‘Robespierre, concentrate.’

‘I understand. There are people I know—they are unconnected to the Party.’

‘I need to leave the city before the Georgians come. If Grisha knows, they all know.’

‘Grisha told me you had a rendezvous with someone in the Tsar’s Village.’

‘Concentrate. Untie me. Bring me water and salt. But first look to Grisha. Turn his head so that his airway is open.’

‘Why would you be kind to him?’

‘If you do it, I’m not the one being kind.’

Sleep-sleep-sleep, she thought, recalling a nursery rhyme she had heard in Tiflis. Don’t lie on the edge of the bed or a grey wolf will come and bite you.

When Saskia saw daylight through the seams of her moving coach, she was detached from the news that she had survived the night. Her bleeding had reduced but her kidneys felt burned. She knew that her death would now be a slow poisoning of the blood, daylight or no daylight, and it would take more than this continuous, secret tour of the city by closed carriage to save her from the Georgians. Robespierre planned to keep her moving while he searched for what he called a “safe landing”. He had found her bandages, towels to line her underwear, and an infusion of blessed milk thistle, which she sipped as the carriage rocked through street after brightening street. Robespierre would not say how he had acquired these medicaments, beyond a mutter that his father would not miss the money. Saskia called him a gentleman and touched his cheek. He frowned and told her to drink more of the tea.

The hours passed. In the early afternoon, the carriage stopped outside an apartment block near the Griboyedov Canal and Saskia was carried, in blankets, to a wheelchair. Robespierre took her to an apartment occupied by polite, indifferent strangers who appeared to owe Robespierre their help and their silence. The strangers offered Saskia food; she declined. She drank only the infusion. On the hour, she changed her bloodstained clothes for nondescript servant apparel. She was careful not to disturb the black band that she wore above her elbow.

Touching the band, she agitated a memory two years old, perhaps three. She had been standing in a book-lined study near Tiflis, in the Caucasus, when she thought she heard a flock of birds settling in a poplar tree outside the window. It was late in the year for such birds, so she pulled the blind. The tree had been empty.

Robespierre, a stranger himself, abandoned her to the care of these strangers. Saskia could do nothing but sit alone and look into the cup of blessed milk thistle, waiting for the Georgians to break through the door and end everything. During these silences, the strangers read books and played cards.

It was late in the evening when Robespierre returned. He claimed to know a reliable smuggler. Saskia allowed him to make the arrangements. He left to do so. At midnight, a boy interrupted Saskia’s sleep with a note. She frowned at the words. Had something broken inside her? She could not understand them.

Внимание! Что-то случилось. Не ищите меня. »Транспортёра« завербовали. Встретитесь с ним в том месте, в котором Ваш хозяин и я в первый раз встретились. »Транспортер« проводит Вас. Пушкин воспевал »Для берегов отчизны дальной Ты покидала край чужой«. Пусть мои мысли Вас охраняют!

She closed her eyes, took a breath, held it, and opened them again. There was a sense of something blurred coming into focus.

Alarm! Something has happened. Don’t look for me. The “transporter” is hired. Meet him at the place your host and I first met. The “transporter” will take you away. Pushkin sang, “Bound for your far home, you are leaving strange lands”. May my thoughts keep you safe!

Saskia stared at the note. Then she bade the boy goodnight and thought about Robespierre and a room in the Great Summer Palace of the Tsars, and home. She slept, and dreamed not of sparrows, but of the Baltic shore and the cinders of amber cast there by the surf.

The rendezvous was at Znamenskaya Square, a busy crossing of the Nevsky and Ligovsky Avenues. Here she met her smuggler. He was an Orthodox Jew in his mid-fifties wearing a padded lapserdak jacket. He would not, at first, meet her eye, but he took Saskia’s money, folded it into a small square, and tucked it into his boot. He looked at her chest. She turned away. She did not trust him.

He said, ‘You stink, my dear,’ but Saskia did not reply. If he learned that she had Yiddish, but was a gentile, this would make her an especially memorable character, which she had no wish to be.

The man took her cases. They were not heavy, since they contained only the minimum expected of a woman travelling to see relatives: lacquer boxes, dolls, some books and clothes.

He walked on and Saskia followed, carefully, as though she had gained fifty years in the night. It would be better to hail a carriage but her money would not stretch so far. She scratched her scalp beneath her kerchief and focused on the smuggler’s lapserdak as he walked ahead of her through the gentleman strollers, street stalls, and scuttling children.