CHAPTER VIII

'I THINK YOU CAN LEAVE US NOW, ALEKSEI IVANOVICH,' SAID PYETR. He stood directly opposite me, with Maks sitting halfway between us.

'What do you mean?'

'It is three of our fellows who have died at Maksim Sergeivich's hand. It is for us to punish him.'

'Maksim Sergeivich is a traitor to his oath as an officer in the Russian army. I am to take him back to Moscow for court-martial,' I announced firmly, despite the fact that I was in no position to enforce my will on them.

Pyetr was resolute, speaking almost in a whisper. 'He is ours.'

A thought occurred to me. 'How did you know we were here?'

Pyetr didn't have the presence of mind to ignore the question; instead he answered with an obvious lie. 'We followed you.'

'No, you didn't,' I told him. 'Otherwise you wouldn't have arrived such a long time after me.'

'Dmitry Fetyukovich told us,' said Iuda.

'And how did he know?'

'I've no idea. Why don't you go back to Moscow and ask him?' replied Iuda.

'Why don't you go back and ask your whore?' said Filipp, and a few of them laughed the same, grubby laugh that I'd heard before.

Iuda came over and took my arm, leading me aside. I glanced down at Maks and saw that he sat in a petrified silence, smart enough to know that he could not run and could not fight and so frantically searching for an alternative way to escape.

'This is really much the best solution, you know, Aleksei,' Iuda said to me smoothly. 'You know that he's a traitor and you know that he deserves to die. But do you want it on your conscience that you killed your friend – or even that you took him back to Moscow to be killed?'

I made no answer.

'Do you doubt that he's a traitor?' continued Iuda.

'No.'

'So he deserves to die.'

'He does.'

'And if you leave him here with us' – Iuda's voice had dropped to a whisper – 'then you'll always be able to say that you were outnumbered; that whatever you believed to be right didn't matter because if you had resisted, we would still have succeeded by force, and you would both be dead.' It was both a cajolement and a threat and it succeeded. I didn't care to ask myself which of the two was the more persuasive.

I went over to Maks and drew his sabre from its scabbard. He was condemned to death and it somehow seemed to lessen the reality of the fact by going through the ritual. I stood in front of him and held the sword above his head, my hands spread wide apart. Maks looked up at me, tears showing behind the lenses of his eyeglasses.

'Please don't do this to me, Aleksei.'

'This is what happens to traitors, Maks. You know that,' I replied quietly, trying to fill my head with such hatred for his treachery that it would drive out all sympathy.

'Not the sword. I mean, don't leave me with them.'

'One death is much like another, Maks,' I told him, though I knew even then it was a lie. 'Would you prefer it to be done by friends?'

He smiled resignedly and then looked away.

I'd never intentionally broken a sabre before and there was no training for this sort of thing given in the army. The sword bent and bent and bent still further, until the blade was almost doubled back on itself, and yet still it would not break. With my arms outstretched as they were over Maks' head, I was at the limit of what strength I could apply. My muscles began to ache with cramp, screaming at me to relieve them of the strain. It took all my energy to keep the blade at the angle I had achieved, but I was rapidly losing the strength to do even that, let alone to bend it further to its breaking point. Suddenly, with a dissonant chime that reminded me somehow of the hissing of a snake, the steel shattered. Both my arms jarred excruciatingly as the release of the metal's stress echoed through them. My left hand, clutching the sharp blade tightly with its two remaining fingers, began to bleed from a cut across the palm.

Two of the Oprichniki, Filipp and Varfolomei I think, took a step forward to assist me, but Iuda raised an arm to hold them back, understanding that this was something I must do alone.

I remembered what I had been about to say minutes earlier, when the Oprichniki arrived. 'How could you of all people, Maks, justify the killing of your fellow man by saying it was in the name of humanity?' I took the two halves of the broken sword, placed them side by side and tossed them dismissively into Maks' lap. Then I turned and walked into the darkness of the night outside.

'But that's the point, Aleksei,' screamed Maks after me in desperation. 'I thought you understood. They're not—' Whatever they were not (and whoever 'they' were), I did not hear. Maks' voice was cut off by a brief, startled yelp as one of the Oprichniki either hit him or . . . I didn't like to think. It was only hours later that I realized that that final sound from Maks was exactly the same cry I had heard from the French soldier, victim of that same terrible group of men, less than a week before in Goryachkino.

Half of my mind had no regrets, and I consoled myself with the knowledge that it was the half with which Maksim himself would have agreed. Taking a step back, I couldn't pity Maks or that French soldier for the way they died, nor could I pity the death of a Russian traitor more than that of a French patriot, nor a foreign mercenary more than a friend of seven years' standing. There's no good way to die and no good reason to die. Death is momentarily unpleasant for those who experience it and often expedient for those who cause it, but the details of the moment of death are not worth worrying about.

The other half of me knew that I had only left Maks there with the Oprichniki out of cowardice. Practical, rational cowardice to be sure (is there any other kind?), but still the fact remained that my intention had been to bring Maks back to Moscow and the reason I hadn't was because of a risk to my own life. Wouldn't that risk have been worth it to give Maks one more hour or one more day of life? Mightn't it have given him one final chance to explain himself in a way that I hadn't so far been able to understand?

As my horse followed its nose and headed back to Moscow with little guidance from me, my mind was filled only with happy memories of the beautiful young man I had just left to die. His treachery, which had concerned me so obsessively for what? – six hours at most – and which had been the cause of his death, was totally forgotten amongst remembrances of his wit, his exuberance and his sparkling cynicism.

In the early hours, as I finally reached the outskirts of Moscow, I realized that although he had been alive when I left him, and though he was, beyond any doubt, dead now, I had no idea of the precise time of Maksim's death, because I had not been there. I recalled the death of my father and my similar ignorance then of its exact moment. I had been scarcely more than a child and my mother had, for what she saw as my protection, kept me out of his room through the last hours of his illness. I remember, as I sat and waited, I had repeatedly wondered how I should be feeling; whether I should be praying for him to survive or mourning the fact that he had not. I had no real concern that getting it wrong would have any practical effect on the fate of my father, but it certainly had an overwhelming bearing on how I felt.

I had vowed then never to make the same mistake – never to walk away and be absent at the moment of a friend's death. And yet here today I had failed to keep that vow, as I would fail again. I could excuse myself of the practical cowardice of allowing the Oprichniki to take him, but there was no defence for my moral cowardice in not staying with him until the end. In any sense that mattered, I had left him to die alone. Worse still, he had known it.

It was morning when I arrived back in Moscow and, in the hours that I had been away, the mood of the city had changed beyond any imagining. The remnants of our army, which Vadim and I had overtaken so easily on the road from Borodino, were now arriving in the city. They were not arriving to regroup, not arriving to make a stand, but arriving because they had nowhere else to go. If they had feared that extra tens of thousands of soldiers would make the city overcrowded, they need not have. As the soldiers were entering, so the civilians were leaving – their confidence of months before in the unreachability of Moscow now vanished. The streets were awash with movement, always from the west, always to the east. Carts piled high with furniture, with fabrics, with silver and with gold, headed out of Moscow, their owners riding up front and keeping a careful eye on their possessions. On some, I could even see the owners, or as often their servants, spread across the goods on the cart like some many-legged spider, trying to keep a hand on every item, so that none might fall by the wayside to be gathered up by the advancing French, who, they were now certain, would soon arrive.

Behind the carts of the people of Moscow came the wagons carrying their wounded defenders. The casualties of Borodino filled any street of the city that was not already occupied by the departing citizens. As one lavishly appointed cartload of property left to the east, it made room for another to enter, loaded with the dying or even the dead. Where the two strata met, there was sometimes a mixing, sometimes a separation. Some of the citizens were repelled by the sight of those who had so bravely fought to defend them, others gladly unloaded their most treasured possessions to make a little room for one wounded soldier to be taken to safety. But while such self-sacrifice might save the life of a single man, it would remove only a drop from the ocean of humanity that was now pouring into the city.

And yet it was one more drop of humanity than I had managed to save that day.

I had no immediate desire to find Vadim and Dmitry. I would have no problem explaining to them why I had returned, against Vadim's instructions, without Maks, but I did not relish the doubting voice in my own head that I knew I must hear as I told them. Though why should I listen to that voice now? It had been happy enough to keep a cowardly silence back in Desna. A man's conscience shouts so much more loudly in the past tense than it ever manages to achieve in the present.

If I was not to see Vadim and Dmitry immediately, then there was only one other place in Moscow that I could go. My intention was simple enough. However cowardly and however shocking it might seem, those souls that were now fleeing the city were acting wisely, and I was going to ensure that Domnikiia would be one of them; to ensure that she had a safe place to go and to give her enough money to provide for her food and travel as she made her way there. At the back of my mind was the fear that the abandonment of Moscow might be the furthest thing possible from her inclination. As I pushed my way through the crowded streets, fending off those citizens unfortunate enough to be travelling on foot and pushing away the blindly searching hands of soldiers who lay dying on open carts, I realized that the city would soon be full of French soldiers; rich, victorious and, above all, amorous French soldiers. Domnikiia could make more from them in a day than she had done of late in a week from the crushed Muscovites. Would she, I wondered, find more popularity as the homely, French Dominique who could remind them of their sweethearts back in Paris or as the exotic, erotic and, most importantly, vanquished Russian Domnikiia? But I was, as I knew well by now, no judge of a Russian's patriotism. When I arrived, she was preparing to leave.

Although it was past one o'clock, well into the brothel's normal trading hours, I arrived to find the door closed and locked. I stepped back into the square and threw a stone up at Domnikiia's window. The window opened and out popped the head of Margarita Kirillovna.

'We're closed,' she snapped.

'Margarita!' I called. She screwed up her eyes as she tried to recognize me. 'Is Domnikiia there?'

Her head disappeared and the window closed again. I waited. Minutes later, I heard the bolts being drawn back at the door. This time, the face that half peeped outside was Domnikiia's. I went over and tried to kiss her, but she smoothly avoided it, beckoning me hurriedly inside and bolting the door behind me. Within, I encountered one of the most beautiful visions of chaos I could ever have imagined. The salon was a mélange of beautiful girls packing their beautiful clothes into trunks, which, though relatively plain, somehow managed to assimilate the beauty of what was going on around them. There were eight girls working at the brothel, and although I had a heart only for one, I had eyes for them all. In their demure, controlled, professional allure they were a temptation to the most puritan of men. In their natural, girlish panic their charm was only augmented by their vitality.

I followed Domnikiia up to her room, where a large trunk took centre stage, half filled with clothes. Margarita came back and forth from her room, adding new layers of attire to the trunk, and as soon as we entered the room, Domnikiia strode over to her wardrobe and began to do the same. She had not spoken a word to me since I had arrived.

As she passed me, I grabbed her wrist and pulled her to me, but this time it was I who aborted our kiss. I had not seen before, since it had been hidden by the door earlier and by her avoiding my direct gaze since, that she had bruises on her right eye and on her high, round cheek. Her upper lip was split just below her right nostril and though it was not a fresh wound, it still oozed blood from where she had reopened it trying to smile. On her jaw I could also see, now I looked closely, the faint bruising of where she had been held by a large, brutal hand.

Although the very conception made me for a moment despise myself more even than I did her assailant, I felt a thrill of attraction for her run through me that was greater than anything I had felt towards her before. Her beauty was accentuated, not hidden, by the vulnerability endowed upon her by those wounds.

I kissed her lips as lightly as I dared, not wanting to hurt her physically, but neither wanting to suggest any diminution of my passion for her as a consequence of these blemishes.

'Who did this to you?'

'I asked you who Dmitry was,' she replied acerbically. 'I found out.'

'He did this?' I tried to sound disbelieving, but just as I was in my heart of hearts unsurprised by the discovery that Maks had been a spy, so I was unsurprised to find that Dmitry could treat a woman like that for his own ends. I'd never known him do it in the past – but there was no inconsistency I could find between the action and what I knew of his character. 'He wanted to know where Maks was, I suppose.'

She didn't answer, but buried her face in my chest and began to cry. Her self-imposed silence so far had been out of fear that she would be unable to control herself. Now she had told me the one important fact that she had to convey, she indulged herself in the pleasure of the abandonment of self-control, and indulged me in the pleasure of being her comforter. Yet she still had one more thing to tell me.

'But I didn't tell him, Lyosha,' she let out through her sobs. 'I didn't. I didn't.'

I could find in my heart no blame for her for having betrayed Maks to Dmitry, and so I was happy to allow her the deception, both to me and to herself. For me it was a relief that she had had some unarguable justification for telling Dmitry. I had pushed to the back of my mind the suggestion made in Desna by Filipp that Domnikiia had helped them, but it had worried me. Even now, though, I had underestimated Domnikiia.

'I told him,' said Margarita, still shuttling back and forth between her room and the trunk.

'Why?' I asked.

Margarita looked up from the trunk, slightly surprised. Then she gestured towards Domnikiia with her eyes before looking back at me. 'Wouldn't you?'

After a few moments, Domnikiia pulled away from me and continued with her packing.

'Where are you heading to?' I asked.

Domnikiia was still unwilling to talk, so Margarita answered for her. 'Yuryev-Polsky.' It was a sound choice; 150 versts to the north-east and well off the route that the French would take even if they did march beyond Moscow. If they were to go any further, it was generally assumed, it would be north-westwards, towards Petersburg. If the fall of Moscow did not precipitate the fall of Russia then the capture of Petersburg – so the French would reason – most surely would.

'Do you need money?' I asked, taking from my pocket a wad of banknotes, which I had intended to give to them – well, to Domnikiia at any rate.

'No,' Margarita replied, then, realizing she sounded ungrateful, added, 'but thank you. Pyetr Pyetrovich is taking care of all of us.'

I tried to show no reaction to the name. Pyetr Pyetrovich was the owner of the building in which I now stood and – in effect, if not in law – the owner of Domnikiia, Margarita and the other girls. On the few occasions when I had met him, he had seemed most amiable and to be completely understanding of my reasons for visiting Domnikiia. But, just as the girls themselves would change their personalities to please the tastes of the client at hand, I'm sure that he would be all things to all men, so that he might gain their custom.

'Protecting his business?'

'I suppose,' replied Margarita.

Domnikiia came away from her packing and, with a murmured 'thank you', took two of the banknotes from my hand. It wasn't a huge amount, but it was strange how the significance of money in our relationship had become so inverted over the past few days.

When I paid her for sex, it had been a symbol of our distance – our independence. Now she took it from me for nothing, to show that she would rather be dependent on me than on Pyetr Pyetrovich. That, at least, was my interpretation.

'When are you leaving?' I asked.

'Tomorrow,' Margarita told me. 'First thing.'

'I'll come and see you again this evening,' I said and made to leave.

'I'll have to let you out,' said Margarita.

'No, I'll go,' Domnikiia told her, her voice now returning to something of its familiar brightness.

'Are you going to be all right?' I asked her at the door.

'We'll be fine,' she said casually. 'Yuryev-Polsky is a nice long way away.'

'No, I meant you.' I raised my hand to stroke her bruised cheek, but refrained for fear of hurting her. She took my hand in hers and pressed it against her face, caressing it and once again running her fingers over what remained of mine.

'These wounds will heal,' she said. 'It was just that . . . It's been a long time.' She smiled, almost nostalgically. 'I'd got used to not being beaten. That's what makes it worth working for Pyetr Pyetrovich.'

I felt her fingers on mine and I knew what she meant. Even wounds like mine, which would never heal, can be forgotten. But the terror of how they were inflicted cannot. A deep hatred for Dmitry welled up inside me. In my concern for Domnikiia, I'd almost forgotten that it was my friend who had done this to her; my friend and therefore my fault. And since there was little I could do to physically punish myself, all my anger became focused on him. He had caused her this pain, he had sent the Oprichniki after me and Maks and he had torn apart my world by exposing Maks as a spy in the first place.

'I'm going to find Dmitry,' I said, making it clear from my tone what I intended to do when I found him. Then I kissed her. 'I'll see you this evening.'

I had half expected her to make some plea for me to be lenient on Dmitry, but none came. I admired her all the more for her desire for retribution. As I walked away, I heard the sound of the heavy bolts being drawn across the door behind me.

I went back to the inn and still found no sign of Dmitry or Vadim, but there was a note slipped under my door. It read simply:

We would meet the following day, the thirtieth of August, at eleven in the morning at location 7. This meant on the south bank of the Moskva, opposite the Kremlin. The initials 'B' and '' indicated that it was from both Vadim and Dmitry. With the enemy almost upon us, it was a wise precaution for us not all to be billeted in one place. I was lucky that they had already made the decision and thus I was the one who did not have to relocate – at least not for the time being.

That afternoon I wrote two letters. The first was to Marfa. There was not much of importance to tell. I mentioned the Battle of Borodino – skipping over my small part in it – and the debate as to whether it was a defeat or a victory, and then went on to downplay the evacuation of Moscow. It was all really just padding before I got on to the subject of Maks. Maks had stayed with us in Petersburg for several months after his repatriation in 1807 and Marfa had met him a few times since, becoming quite fond of him.

I told her as close to the truth as I dared; that he had been a French spy, that he had sent some comrades to their deaths at the hands of the French, that he had confessed it and that he had been executed. Reading back through my sanitized account, I could see that no one could have any reason to feel sympathy for Maks. No one would question that he deserved to die for his treason, or even blame me for letting the Oprichniki carry out the sentence. So I added a few words in defence of Maks, the same defence which still led me to question my own actions. I wrote of his idealism, his admiration for the Revolution and for Bonaparte and of his refusal, in spite of all these, to do anything that would betray his true friends.

The second letter was to Maksim's mother, Yelizaveta Malinovna. I had never met her – she lived far away in the south, in Saratov – but Maks had often spoken of her, not with fondness (that was not his style) but with, I suppose, loyalty. I laughed to myself as the word entered my head, but I had to admit that Maks was no less loyal than most, his loyalty was simply placed elsewhere. Maks' father had died of dysentery when Maks was very young. His only other close relatives were two sisters, but I didn't know where they lived. Yelizaveta Malinovna would forward the tragic news. In my letter to her I made no mention of treachery. Maksim had died like a hero fighting the French. I was unable, I explained, to give full details for reasons of national security, but I gave enough background for her to infer, once the histories of the war had been published, that he had died bravely at Borodino.

After I had written the two letters, recounting Maks' death to both my wife and his mother, I realized that I had completely forgotten to tell Domnikiia. In hindsight, it may have been a wise decision. She had to be told, but the timing and the approach had to be well considered. That, however, hadn't been the reason for my not telling her. It had simply slipped my mind. The death of one of my closest friends, with my collaboration, at which I had wept all through my journey back from Desna, had been pushed out of my mind by the sight of a few bruises on my lover's face. I was a very fickle man.

True to my promise, I returned to see Domnikiia that evening. As I made my way through the city, the streets still pulsated with the flow of people and their possessions and of retreating soldiers. The proportion of soldiers was increasing as more and more wounded came into the city. Some could walk, others were carried on stretchers by their companions and still others lay, conscious or otherwise, on flat wagons, the dying mixed indiscriminately with the dead. It may not have been that all of the 30,000 Russian casualties came through the city over those few days, but it seemed very close to it.

When I arrived, the brothel was still closed and the door bolted. This time, a stone at the window attracted the attention of Domnikiia herself. She came down and I suggested that we should walk for a while. We were away from the main thoroughfares of the city and so the streets and squares were a little quieter. We were not the only couple that wandered the streets of Moscow that night, hand in hand, knowing that they would soon be parted.

After some talk and some silence, I came to the point.

'Maks is dead,' I announced quietly.

'I didn't like to ask.'

We walked on in silence for a little longer. 'Don't you want to know what happened?'

'Yes,' she replied, 'but you don't have to tell me.'

'He was a traitor.' I didn't offer any more detail and I felt confident she wouldn't ask.

'I liked him,' she said after a pause. To her, as to me, liking him was quite orthogonal to his being a spy. There are likable traitors and hateful patriots.

'So did I.'

'Did he know that?'

'Yes,' I said with a misunderstanding laugh. 'We'd known each other seven years.' Except, of course, I hadn't completely known him.

'I mean at the end. Did he know that you still liked him?'

Did it really matter what a man felt in the last few minutes of his life, compared with all the things he's felt in the years leading up to that? Perhaps now, less than a day after Maks' death, those final minutes mattered more than they would in ten years' time when his whole life could be viewed from a distance. Mattered more to me, I meant, not to him. I doubted whether I could have gone through with it – gone through with leaving him to the Oprichniki – if my final thoughts or my final words to him had been of friendship. I had pushed all such ideas out of my mind with thoughts of him as a traitor. Although our liking of Maks could be quite independent of our knowledge of his treachery, in the final reckoning of him, one had to be counted as outweighing the other. In Desna, Maks' treachery had been the weightier matter, but the scales still fluctuated hour by hour, reluctant to reveal the side on which they would finally come to rest.

I said nothing in reply to Domnikiia's question.

'What are you going to do?' she asked after a while.

'About what?'

'Are you going to stay in the city?'

'I don't know. I'll talk with Vadim and Dmitry tomorrow.'

She stopped and turned to me, speaking with a new intensity. 'Why don't you leave with me in the morning?'

It was tempting, but I knew my cowardice and my self-centredness could only reveal themselves in more subtle situations, where they could hide within a maze of soul-searching analysis.

To abandon my fellow men and my country to an invading enemy for the sake of a woman – that would be too blatant a betrayal of my duty.

'Russia needs me more than ever now.' It sounded pretentious, but I meant it genuinely. 'There's a lot we can do to undermine Bonaparte's army once it gets here.'

'So you're staying?'

'That's my guess.'

'And if you have to leave?'

'I know where you'll be.'

'And if you're killed?'

Again, Domnikiia had asked a question to which I could find no reply.

We were back at the door of the brothel. We stood facing one another, her hands in mine, with nothing more to say, but not wanting to say what could well be our final goodbye.

We heard the sound of the bolts being drawn from inside. The door opened to reveal Margarita, who must have seen our approach. She pulled the door open further to reveal another figure – tall, blond-haired and pale.

'Good evening, Aleksei Ivanovich,' he said.

It was Iuda.