A Allen: Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

The young man gritted his teeth, balling his hands into tight fists beneath the heavy rugs. Taking a series of deep breaths, he began to intone his daily catechism, unconsciously rocking his body backwards and forwards in time to the rhythm of his thoughts.

This is the tenth day of sleigh travel. The twelfth since we left Tiumen and the train.

The seventeenth since we were taken to Nicolai Station. The twenty-fourth since I was moved from the transfer prison. It is eighty-five days since we were sentenced. One hundred and fourteen days since my speech in court. One hundred and thirty-three days since our trial began. Two hundred and ninety days since the arrest of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies on the third of December nineteen hundred and five.

The numbers acted like blunt hooks, giving him something to hold onto as well as a record of his journey, and slowly he felt the panic begin to ebb away and his breath coming more easily. As the familiar faintness that threatened to overcome him in moments of high anxiety began to pass he opened his eyes and sighed, embarrassed at his weakness.

It is imperative that I keep alert, he told himself. At least if I was in a cell, I could carve a notch on the wall to mark the passage of time. Here, there is nothing.

He began looking around the vehicle in which he lay cocooned for something that offered the potential of a calendar, idly wondering whether such markings, made within the subjective confines of an objectively moving environment, had a deeper significance. The thought intrigued him: there was something there, if only he could concentrate and formulate the idea…

With a slight sense of surprise, he realised that he was staring at the long barrel of the guard’s rifle which lay secure within the soldier’s folded arms. His eyes followed the length of the weapon down to the floor of the troika and he saw that the soldier had stuck one booted foot through the loop of the rifle sling, lest his prisoner should try to disarm him as he slept. The broad, unpolished butt lay invitingly close to his own foot. Could he perhaps carve his calendar on that? Suppressing a chuckle, the young man wrapped his arms tighter around himself, taking pleasure from imagining the guard’s reaction upon waking.

In front of him, the driver cracked his whip across the broad backs of his team, urging them on to their destination. His orders had been clear. It was expected that this special convoy of prisoners would maintain a steady progress of fifty versts a day. The three plunging ponies, their nostrils pluming with vapour in the cold air, panted with the exertion of the long run.

Katya closed the kitchen door behind her and stood on the top step, sniffing the chill night air. Her snout-like nose wrinkled as it caught the familiar smell of the distant riverbank to the east of the town that told her more snow was on its way.

Moving cautiously, she descended the short flight of steps that led down to the Tortsovs’ back yard, taking care to keep the earthenware jar of goat’s meat soup upright. As she reached the bottom step, the bell of the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary began to toll for the evening service. The knowledge that Father Arkady would notice her absence still troubled her. Pulling her shawl snugly round her shoulders, she crossed herself and passed through the gate into the narrow lane that ran behind the houses. Cradled beneath the coarse shawl, the jar’s warmth and weight comforted her. It reminded her of her sister’s baby, and of the young soul lately made flesh that might even now be drawing its first shuddering breath in the room above Pirogov’s distant workshop.

Her annoyance with her mistress returned as she began feeling her way in the darkness along the rough fence that led to Menshikov Street. Madame Tortsova’s insistence that the priest would forgive her on this occasion – that she was on an ‘errand of mercy’ – had sounded hollow and unconvincing. The doctor’s wife knew what great store she placed in the priest’s blessing. Katya was, after all, the priest’s charge; Dr. Tortsov was only her employer. It had been Father Arkady who had picked her out of the snow bank after the fire. It was Father Arkady that had cared for her after her parents had been buried in the pauper’s yard; still clinging to each other like two charcoaled tree trunks struck simultaneously by lightning. The priest had taken her in and, even though she was neither as pretty nor as quick as the other girls of her age, he had fed and clothed her. And now she had grown, he had sent her to help Dr. Tortsov’s wife keep house. Katya had never once questioned the priest’s commandment, though her own sleeping quarters were cold and cheerless and the years had made the doctor short tempered and his childless wife shrewish. The housemaid knew that for as long as she lived in the attic room of the doctor’s house, she would neither starve nor want for shelter. But to her mind, Madame Tortsova had been wrong to order her to go straight to the Pirogovs’ and not to attend the evening service on her way. Her mistress would be punished, thought Katya as she reached the corner, along with the other sinners. They would all feel the Hand of God.

The fence had ended, falling away with the houses before the expanse of Menshikov Street. Still brooding on Madame Tortsova’s intransigence, she slowly advanced, stepping high over the frozen sleigh ruts that criss-crossed the iron-hard ground. Fear of tripping in the darkness and spilling the soup made her clumsy and hesitant but she reached the other side of the street without mishap. She felt her way along the edge of the icy boardwalk until she came to the steps in front of Leonid Kavelin’s house. The timber merchant was a wealthy man; his house was one of the few free-standing buildings in the town centre. Surrounded on all sides by roads, he had erected a high wooden fence to keep out the gaze of the vulgar and the curious.

Ahead Katya could make out the distant glow of the oil lamps that burned outside the hospital; tiny pin-pricks of light that would be shielded from the approaching blizzard by thick glass bulbs that had been brought all the way from Tobolsk. The sight cheered her and she walked with more confidence across the furrowed surface of Ostermann Street, ignoring the biting cold that snapped at her calves as she lifted the hem of her skirt to mount the steps on the opposite side.

The nearer she drew to the main intersection with Alexander III Boulevard, the more insistent the tolling of the church’s bell grew in her ears. She strove to ignore it and began chanting to herself the words ‘errand of mercy’ as she passed by the closed shutters of Kuzma Gvordyen’s bakery and confectionery shop. A picture was slowly forming in her imagination: an image of the wife of Gleb Pirogov, the carpenter, lying exhausted in her stall; weakened by what Father Arkady called the miracle of birth. Clutching the jar tighter to her bosom, she hurried on, the wooden soles of her crudely fashioned boots clattering over the uneven boards. From the kitchen she had overheard the doctor say that this would be the Pirogovs’ fifth birth in four years, their third child if it lived, and that Pirogov’s family would welcome the scraps of freshly cooked meat that Madame Tortsova had told her to stir into the broth. Katya wondered what the baby would look like. Would it seem as red, old and angry as her own brothers’ and sisters’ babies had been when they were born? Perhaps it would be different, more like the calm ivory baby in the books that Father Arkady had shown her. The thought thrilled her. Had not Joseph also been a carpenter? How wonderful that would be! she thought. The Holy Father born again; here, in Berezovo! And she, Katya, would be the first to bring him gifts.