Michael Pearce - Dmitri and the One-Legged Lady

‘And you’ve said!’ put in Vera Samsonova.

‘If you want to improve them,’ said Dmitri, employing one of the arguments that Prince Dolgorukov had used to persuade him, ‘the best way is from the inside.’

‘If you want to improve your career,’ said Vera Samsonova nastily, ‘the best way is from the inside.’

The thought, it must be admitted, had crossed Dmitri’s own mind. It was all very well for the others to tell him to abandon his career in the State Prosecution Service and work for the greater good of mankind. The trouble was that mankind was unlikely to pay him; and if you were a young lawyer struggling to make your way in Tsarist Russia of the eighteen nineties, that was quite a consideration.

It was not that he was against working for the greater good: it was just that he wanted to eat while he was doing it. So when Prince Dolgorukov had approached him after that little business of the massacre at Tiumen, he had been willing to lend at least a quarter of an ear.

‘You will rise more quickly than most,’ the Prince had assured him. ‘A glittering career awaits you!’

Unfortunately, it appeared to await him at Kursk. Wasn’t that sacrifice enough, thought Dmitri, bridling?

His friends sensed that perhaps they had gone too far.

‘I am sure Dmitri will do his best,’ said Sonya conciliatorily.

‘Yes, but for whom?’ said Vera Samsonova.

‘I do think that’s unkind, Vera,’ said Sonya severely.

‘Yes,’ said Igor Stepanovich. ‘It’s not surprising if Dmitri gets outwitted by someone like Prince Dolgorukov.’

Dmitri bit back his reply. With Dmitri biting his tongue and Vera Samsonova biting hers, the rest of the evening passed off amicably.

Dmitri told them about the One-Legged Lady.

Why on earth, asked Vera, would anyone in their right senses want to steal an icon? And in particular the Holy Icon of the One-Legged Lady of Kursk?

‘Because it is encrusted with diamonds,’ said Igor Stepanovich.

‘Because it has miraculous powers of healing,’ said Sonya, who had clearly imbibed insufficiently of the sceptical currents of the West during her stay in Europe.

Vera frowned. Russian intellectual society was sharply divided between westernizers, who saw in Western liberalism the best hope for the salvation of Russian society, and slavophils, whose views were exactly opposite. The little group of friends were strongly westernizers.

The group fell to discussing the general problem posed by religion for the development in Russia of a truly modern society. Sonya claimed that there was no problem since even Europe was not perfect and what was needed was a marriage of the best of Russia, which was its deep spirituality, with the best of the West, which was its progressive ideas. Vera said that no such marriage was possible because the two were contradictory. And Dmitri, after his fifth glass of vodka, heard himself maintaining that what Russia needed was a Dissolution of the Monasteries on the Scottish model (he had never been quite clear about the difference between Scotland and England).

The consensus was that religion was one of the things that was holding Russia back. As for the One-Legged Lady, the general view – put most forcibly by Vera Samsonova – was that if some old relic that smacked of superstition had gone missing, then so much the better. And what a relatively enlightened person like Dmitri was doing trying to track it down, the group, with a return to its earlier doubts about the genuineness of his commitment to progress, simply failed to see.

Even if Dmitri had been minded to return to the Monastery, he would have been unable to, for the Procurator had bespoken the sleigh for the rest of the week for a round of social visits.

‘But the One-Legged Lady –’

‘That old icon?’ said the Procurator offhandedly, looking up from his newspaper, ‘I’d forget about it if I were you.’

‘But –’

‘In any case, I can’t spare you, I’m afraid,’ said the Procurator.

Dmitri was surprised. The Procurator had always been able to spare him before. Only too readily.

‘Too much going on here.’ The Procurator waved a vague hand.

Since the only work that Dmitri was aware of were the cases that the Procurator had passed on to him, he was even more surprised. They were all of the ‘she-put-a-spell-on-my-cow’ sort. One of the duties of the Procurator’s office was to assess potential charges and decide if they merited further investigation. Dmitri had taken one look at these and decided that they did not.

The Procurator glanced at his watch and put the newspaper down.

‘You’re needed here,’ he said in a voice that brooked no argument. ‘I have to go out. I’m having lunch with Marputin.’

Dmitri shrugged his shoulders and settled down to reading the latest novel from St Petersburg. At lunch time, feeling the need for a breath of fresh air, he went out for a walk and in the main street he met Ludmilla Mitkin. She was dressed in Cossack boots, a long fur coat and a small astrakhan hat and looked absolutely ravishing: a considerable improvement, thought Dmitri, on what usually walked down the main street in Kursk.

‘Hello,’ she said, ‘would you like to give me some legal advice?’

Dmitri thought he would, and they turned into the park, where old women were sweeping the snow from the paths with brooms made of birch twigs. It had frozen hard the previous night after a partial thaw and the trees were heavy with icicles. They sparkled in the sun like chandeliers.

The last thing that Dmitri had expected was that she really would want legal advice. Unfortunately, she did.

‘My mother’s family,’ she said, ‘had an estate up in the north. It was where the family originally started and had been in our possession for nearly three hundred years. When the serfs were freed, we kept the house and a little land but agreed to pass most of it to the local peasants. It was the same kind of settlement as elsewhere. The Government lent them the money to pay for the land and they had to repay it over forty-nine years. Not surprisingly, most of them have been unable to keep up the repayments and now someone is going round offering to take over the repayments for them in return for the land. What I want to know is: is this legal?’

‘In principle, yes; but a lot depends on who has title to the land. If the title was passed to individuals, then the man has every right to purchase it. Usually, however, it was not passed to individuals; ownership was vested in the village community as a whole. If that was the case then it would be much harder for the man to get his hands on it.’

‘Why would it be harder?’

‘Because everyone in the village would have to agree. And there is no way,’ said Dmitri, ‘that everyone in a village, not in a Russian village, at any rate, is going to agree.’

‘Not even if they were all offered money? Lots of it?’

‘The argument would be very persuasive. Even so, there would be someone who wouldn’t agree. If only because he was holding out for more.’

‘There is no legal obstacle, however?’

‘Only that consent has to be found.’

Ludmilla looked cast down.

‘I was hoping there would be,’ she said.

‘I’m afraid not. Why were you hoping?’

She hesitated.

‘The person who is buying up the title has promised to return Yabloki Sad to the family.’

‘Well, that’s very nice,’ said Dmitri.

‘In return for something.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Dmitri. ‘What?’

‘Me.’

When Dmitri got back to the Court House he found Maximov, the Chief of Police, waiting at the top of the steps. He rushed down to meet him.

‘Dmitri Alexandrovich! Thank God you’re here! Have you any idea where Boris Petrovich is?’