A Allen: Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

Lifting his hand, she squeezed his fingers impatiently.

“That’s why I must ask you for your forgiveness. I was wrong to fall in love with you when I was already deeply in love with someone else. I had no right to.”

“But what am I to do?” he asked miserably. “Without you, life means nothing to me.”

With a smile she turned his palm uppermost and held it against her cheek.

“You will soon forget me and meet someone better,” she said. “Someone younger. Someone kinder. Save your love for them. I’m not worthy of it.”

Angrily, he pulled his hand away and glared at her.

“But I don’t want anybody else,” he protested stubbornly. “You know the age doesn’t make any difference. I could never love anybody the same way I love you.”

She shook her head.

“What choice do either of us have?” she asked sadly. “You know what will happen if we don’t part now. You will lose your position and you would never find another doctor to work with. Just us being here now…” she added, looking bleakly around the deserted dining room, “it’s impossible.”

“Please, Yeliena.”

Suddenly angry, she turned back to face him across the table.

“What do you want from me, Anton Ivanovich? You know perfectly well that I am not free to give you my love, or don’t you care? Do you want only my body? Is that it? Do you want me to be known as Chevanin’s blyad ?”

As he recoiled from the viciousness of her accusation, Chevanin felt an ache open and bloom within him; an ache more painful than anything he had ever imagined. His face stiffened. Unable to look at her any longer, he averted his eyes.

“I am sorry,” Yeliena was saying. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

Immobilised by the terrible hurt that was clawing at his innards, he sat slumped in his chair and looked on as, with a steady hand, Yeliena refilled first his glass and then her own. He was dimly aware of the faint chimes of the clock in the hotel’s vestibule striking the half hour.

In her sitting room, Nina Roshkovskaya watched as Trotsky helped himself to a second portion of the stew that had been prepared for him. He was wearing an old shirt and a pair of trousers of her husband’s. She saw that, because he was slightly smaller in build than Andrey, the sleeves of the shirt hung loose on his arms and one of the cuffs had already dipped in the gravy. Glancing up, he caught her looking at him and smiled.

“This is very good,” he said, gesturing with his spoon. “Thank you.”

She acknowledged the compliment with an imperceptible inclination of her head. There was nothing about him that she liked; neither his quick smile, his greedy officious eyes or his table manners. He was an intruder in her home and for the life of her she could not see what Andrey saw in him. Very rarely did her husband surprise her. Since her affliction, they had become as close as a brother and sister, or so she had believed. But sometimes, at times such as this, she wondered if she knew him at all.

When Trotsky had scraped his dish clean, he pushed his chair away from the table and stretched his legs out in front of him. At his feet, ready to be snatched up at a moment’s notice, lay a gussi and the malitsa stolen from the clothes pole of the Widow Golitsyn.

Looking at them, he asked:

“What will you do with my prison clothes after I leave? They will be incriminating evidence if they are found.”

“I shall cut them up and put them in the stove,” she told him. “They will be gone by the morning. If you like, you can help me. I find it difficult to handle the scissors efficiently. They are in my work basket.”

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure,” he said.

In a few moments he had fetched the uniform and was busy reducing the stained and grubby clothes to ragged six inches squares.

“You are younger than I thought,” she told him as he worked. “The way Andrey was talking, I thought you must be at least his age.”

“How old is he?” asked Trotsky with a frown of concentration as he worked at a stubborn trouser seam.

“Thirty-six. And you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Too young,” Nina murmured disapprovingly. “You have so much life left in front of you.”

Looking up from his work, Trotsky shrugged.

“For my last nine birthdays, I’ve been either on the run, in exile, or in prison. I’ve been to the Opera in Paris, walked amongst the mountains in Switzerland and listened to the debates in the British Parliament. It’s a life.”

“Have you ever killed a man?”

For a fraction of a second, Trotsky hesitated, wondering if the woman knew how close her husband had come to being stabbed that morning.

“No,” he retorted. “Have you?”

“That, at least, is something,” she said with a sigh of relief. “I believe you, otherwise I would not be helping you. No doubt if you had killed anybody, your answer would have been exactly the same.”

He lay the scissors down amongst the tattered remnants in his lap and looked at her.

“Yes,” he replied firmly, “exactly the same.”

“And if I asked you whether somebody acting on your orders had ever committed murder, what would you say?”

“I’d say firstly that I am not a terrorist and do not support terrorism and secondly that I don’t give orders.”

Nina Roshkovskaya threw her head back and laughed.

“Don’t be so modest!” she mocked him. “You wouldn’t have been brought all this way here guarded by a company of soldiers if someone didn’t think you gave orders; that you held some sort of power.”

“It is a case of mistaken identity. A miscarriage of justice. Besides, there were others with me.”

“When it comes to apportioning blame, there are always others,” she observed drily. “We are talking about you.”

“In that case, yes. I gave orders, but not the sort that killed people.”

“But if it had been necessary, you would have done?” she persisted.

“Yes.”

“And would still do in the future?”

He sighed and shook his head.

“We are fighting a war,” he explained slowly. “People get killed in wars. Ask the Minister for the Interior. Ask your own Colonel Izorov.”

Suddenly agitated, he got up and began to pace to and fro. The woman was beginning to unsettle him. Pausing by the mantelpiece, he stared at the clock.

“What time did Goat’s Foot say he was going to arrive?”

“You still have a little time to wait,” she told him. “Sit down and rest yourself. You have a long journey ahead of you.”

Grudgingly, he returned to the table and, picking up the scissors again, continued the destruction of his prison clothes.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said. “About what you believe in.”

“Why are you asking me all these questions?” he demanded suspiciously.

“It’s quite simple. Firstly because I am curious and secondly because it concerns me.”

“How does it concern you?”

“I would have thought that was obvious,” she observed. “For better or for worse my husband and I find ourselves responsible for releasing you back into the population. I am merely trying to gauge the likely consequences. One day, it may even be tomorrow, we could find ourselves having to account for our actions.”

“If you mean your Colonel Izorov, don’t worry,” he said grimly. “I have taken every precaution against capture.”

“Actually, I didn’t mean Colonel Izorov, although he too will have questions that will have to be answered. No, I meant a much higher power.”