CHAPTER XI
I WAS IN MY BEDROOM – THE BEDROOM I HAD SLEPT IN AS A CHILD.
I was well aware that this room was nothing like the room I had as a child but, as is often the case in dreams, I knew as an indisputable fact that this was the bedroom of my childhood. Two beds lay, quite incorrectly, along opposite walls of the room, with space between to walk. In the far wall, which the heads of both beds abutted, was a window. The curtains were drawn shut, but one could perceive that outside it was a bright, sunny winter's day.
On the left-hand bed lay a boy, sleeping on his side with his face to the wall so that only his back was in view. It was – and again I knew this for a fact without seeing his face – myself at the age of five or six. On the same bed, with her back to the boy, sat my wife, Marfa, showing polite interest in what she saw on the other side of the room.
Standing at the foot of the other bed was the Emperor Napoleon. He faced the woman who sat on the bed, his wife – the Empress Marie-Louise. In her lap she held a large bowl, and in the bowl there were figs. She held up a fig to the emperor, who took it in his hand. He raised it to his mouth and bit into it and, as the green skin ruptured, the red flesh and seeds oozed out around his lips. He licked his lips clean and then took four more bites from the fig until only the stalk was left. He popped this into his mouth and swallowed it, as if that had been the tastiest part of the whole fruit, and then he licked his fingers.
He held out his hand – his left hand this time – towards his empress for another fig and I noticed for the first time that his hand was missing its last two fingers, just like mine. I looked at my own left hand, cradling it in my right as I considered my disfigurement, and wondered how it was that I had never before remarked on the coincidence of Bonaparte having the same injury I did. I looked up again and found the emperor had gone, or at least he had gone from my view, for I was now looking through his eyes, although I did not know whether the others in the room were seeing Bonaparte or Aleksei Ivanovich standing before them.
I looked towards my empress to find that she too had transformed – though little transformation was needed – from Marie-Louise into my own Domnikiia. I sat down on the bed close beside her, glancing over to Marfa, who still displayed the same inquisitive equanimity at what was going on. Domnikiia still held the bowl on her lap, but now, rather than figs, it contained grapes. The fruit, I suddenly knew, and knew also that I had always known, was poisoned. Domnikiia proffered the bowl across the room to Marfa, silently inviting her to take one of those delicious grapes. Marfa presented the palm of her hand in polite refusal.
Looking once again at the boy behind her on the bed, it occurred to me that I had been mistaken in thinking that he was my younger self. Just as any father would know his son from a single hair of his head, I recognized the boy as my son, Dmitry Alekseevich. At the same moment, I understood that he was dead; poisoned by Domnikiia's grapes. The knowledge saddened me, but I would express the emotion no more deeply than that. At his belt he wore the little wooden sword that I had made for him the last time I had seen him.
The door, next to the foot of the bed on which the boy's body lay, opened and my mother walked into the room. She had died when I was twenty-two, and although, even in my dream, I was well aware of this, it seemed perfectly reasonable to now see my dead mother entering my childhood bedroom. Almost as soon as she had come into the room, she went across to Domnikiia, who once again held out the bowl to offer her a grape.
My mother declined with the polite warmth with which I felt distantly familiar. 'No thank you, my dear,' she said, smiling at Domnikiia. 'I'm already dead.' These were the only words that anyone spoke throughout the entire dream.
Then she went and sat on the other bed, next to my wife. They greeted one another with courtesy, but with no curiosity.
Domnikiia held the bowl out to my mother again. As she did so, I saw on her hand a ring. It was the figure of a dragon, with a body of gold, emerald eyes and red, forked tongue; the same ring that Zmyeevich had been wearing that night when we met. Around the ring, Domnikiia's hand looked old and pale. Decaying skin was flaking away from her shrivelled fingers. I looked up to her face and saw that it was not her hand that wore the ring, but the hand of Zmyeevich himself. He was leaning over her from behind, holding and covering her hand, and guiding her as she offered the bowl of grapes. He looked older than when I had seen him. His grey hair had become white and his skin was decrepit and terribly wrinkled. His eyes were the eyes of an old man, begging to be remembered as he was in his youth.
Still my mother and Marfa maintained their polite rejection of the grapes. Zmyeevich left Domnikiia and went over to the door through which my mother had entered. He opened the door and, with a gesture of his hand, ushered in the Oprichnik Pyetr. Pyetr crossed the room to stand behind Domnikiia. At his entrance, Domnikiia had glanced towards the door to see who it was, but having seen, indicated no further interest and returned her gaze to me. Pyetr bent forward. As he did so, his hand slipped under her arm and around her, coming to rest upon her breast. His head hovered above her shoulder for a moment as he paused to lick his lips, then he bent down further, gently kissing her neck, and at the same time, noticed by no one else in the room but me, he squeezed her breast in his hand.
Domnikiia maintained her gaze on mine. As Pyetr kissed her and caressed her, her eyes widened very slightly, like a woman who has just seen her lover across a room of friends and tries to hide her reaction from those around her. Pyetr stood up and removed his hand and, as he did so, Domnikiia reached into the bowl and took out a grape, which she held out towards me. I opened my mouth, in full knowledge that the grapes were poisoned, and let her slip it inside, closing my lips quickly so as to briefly feel her fingers between them as she took her hand away.
Pyetr left, although I have no idea how, and at the door, Zmyeevich let in the next Oprichnik, Andrei. His behaviour was identical to Pyetr's; the kiss on Domnikiia's neck and the hand on Domnikiia's breast. Her response was once again the same and I once again greedily consumed the grape as she gave it to me, aware that I would be poisoned in the same way that my son, lying lifeless on the bed across the room, had been poisoned, but still eager to eat the grapes because of the slightest of touches of Domnikiia's fingers that accompanied them.
And so the story retold itself over and over for each of the Oprichniki. Zmyeevich showed into the room next Iakov Zevedayinich, then Ioann, then Filipp, Varfolomei, Foma, Matfei, Iakov Alfeyinich, Faddei and Simon. Each one kissed and fondled Domnikiia, and each time she responded by feeding me another poisoned grape. I swallowed each grape gladly, with an increasing sense of sorrow that they would cause my death, but with no desire to do anything to prevent it.
After Simon had come and gone, I knew that there was just one more Oprichnik left to arrive. I glanced over to the other bed, where my wife and my mother still both sat with the same look of docile curiosity on their faces, knowing in their hearts the danger of what they were witnessing, but too indulgent of my eccentric whims to criticize these people, whom they took to be my friends. Behind them, I noticed that the little wooden sword at my son's side was broken in two. And my son was bigger, much bigger – but still dead. It was now Maks, and I understood then that it always had been, although I could still not see his face.
Zmyeevich had one final guest to invite into the room. It was Iuda. He walked up to Domnikiia, but did nothing more than bow slightly and tip his hat. Then he went over to the window and flung the curtains wide open, filling the room with light. Through the window I saw the winter scene outside. A small pond sat in the middle of a snow-covered garden. A wide, jagged crack split the sheet of ice that lay on top of it. Iuda turned away from the window and towards me with a triumphant smile on his face, his arms still raised in the air from where they had clutched the curtains, accepting the cheers of a crowd that I could not hear or see, but that I knew was there.
He stood behind Domnikiia and bent over her, not to kiss her or caress her as the others had done, but simply to take a grape from the bowl in front of her. He walked over to me and casually offered me the grape, which I took in my hand, but did not eat. I held it between my thumb and fingers and offered it back to Domnikiia, but she refused, shaking her head and backing away from the death that she was well aware the grapes would bring and which I had so calmly accepted. Iuda again stepped behind her and held her head still, allowing me to hold the grape up to her lips, but still she kept them tight shut, squeezing her eyes shut as well, as if to add to her impregnability.
I crushed the grape against her lips and, though she tried to turn her head away, she could not. Iuda's grip held her firm. I saw my two remaining fingers rubbing the skin and crushed flesh of the grape against Domnikiia's lips, trying to force her to accept even the slightest morsel of the poison. I looked at the stumps of my two missing fingers and thought how much easier it would have been, had my hand been complete, to force her lips open and make her taste the fruit.
And then I noticed, curled around my middle finger, a ring shaped like a dragon, with a body of gold, emerald eyes and red, forked tongue.
I woke up.
Whether a dream is a nightmare is a question not of content, but of mood. Nothing in my dream had been conspicuously horrifying, but I awoke with the feeling – as certain as any knowledge I have ever had – that something irredeemably awful had taken place, something that had destroyed my whole world. Had I been asked what that thing was, I would have been unable to say, and in the time it would have taken me to recall what it was, I would have woken up enough to realize it was nothing. But for a few seconds after waking, I had no doubt as to either its existence or its enormity.
At the moment of waking I leapt out of bed, instinctively feeling that my fear would require a remedy of physical action. My surroundings were strange. I had to do something to fight off the terror that confronted me. But I couldn't remember what I had to do – or even what that terror was.
Within seconds, wakefulness returned to me fully. I was in a bedroom in the abandoned house in Zamoskvorechye. This was the fourth night I'd been there. I recalled my dream, and could have recited every detail of it. Rationality took control of me as I understood that the fears were in my own mind – that they had no other reality. The sense of relief permeated both mind and body like a warming glass of vodka. But still it had been a nightmare. Still I was haunted by the childlike fear of going back to sleep and possibly returning to that horrifying place from which, by waking, I had just escaped.
I lay back down on the bed. I had no idea what time it was – outside, it was still dark as pitch and I felt no urge to light a candle. I wondered whether I would be able to return to sleep. As a young child, when I'd had a nightmare, my mother had sometimes let me sleep in her bed until morning. My father would not hear of such mollycoddling, so it was only when he was away that it was allowed. After he died, I grew up very quickly and so the need no longer arose. Even then I would fail to go back to sleep, but I would lie awake in terror in my own bed, like a man.
And now I was a man, and still I lay awake. I went over the dream again and again in my mind, trying to determine which specific element it was that had turned it into a nightmare, or to fall back to sleep in the attempt. It was something about the grapes that seemed most resonant with the sense of fearfulness that still lingered in me; something in the act of Domnikiia's offering them, of my taking them, although the prospect of my death from the poison held little apprehension for me.
I may have dozed as I lay there, yet I would swear that I was wide awake throughout; just as curled up in the safety of my mother's bed I had still never felt safe enough to slip back into the world of unconsciousness. The horror would always be ended by the sound of birds. As dawn broke, birdsong would hail the resurrection of the sun and the beginning of the new day. Time – which had stopped in the continual, unchanging darkness of the early hours, when there was no way of telling whether one's last thought had occurred a second ago or an hour ago – would begin again.
And so there in Moscow, the dawn chorus, which I still, as I had since childhood, associated both with being terrified and with the termination of that terror, eventually heralded the new day. Time began again and the night, and the nightmare, could be forgotten.
As rationality at last became fully resurgent in me I realized that a rational man should find much more to fear in that particular day than there had been in the night before it. That was the day that the French would enter Moscow.
It was well into the afternoon when the French finally arrived from the west, even as the last brigades of what remained of the Russian army scuttled away antipodally to the east. Amongst the last to leave, so the rumour-mongers would have it, had been Count Rostopchin, the city's governor. Fearful that the Russian mob would not let him depart, he had delivered to them a restaurateur by the name of Vereshchagin who was accused of being a French spy. The mob had torn Vereshchagin to pieces, while Rostopchin slipped away to freedom, unmolested. It was not the only time that I would find parallels between myself and Moscow's governor.
When they did arrive, the invaders were led not by Bonaparte, but by his brother-in-law, Marshal Murat, whom Bonaparte (ashamed, as any republican would be, of having a common soldier marry his sister) had elevated to the rank of King of Naples. Bonaparte himself was to follow Murat into the city the following day. I secreted myself among a small crowd of inquisitive Muscovites who witnessed Murat's arrival with more curiosity than fear or respect. Many thought that they were seeing Bonaparte himself, but I had seen enough pictures of the Little Corporal to know that this was not he. The flamboyant uniform and loose, curly, almost feminine hair were styles that Bonaparte would have abhorred, and left me in no doubt as to which one of France's marshals this was.
French troops spread in waves across the deserted city, showing little concern for the few Russians that remained. I was stopped occasionally, but there were far too few Russian speakers amongst them to accompany every platoon. When challenged I, like others I saw in the city, had merely to reply with a stream of suitably grovelling Russian babble and I was allowed on my way.
That day was a Monday, and our arranged meeting place for Mondays was Red Square itself. In more conventional times, it was an ideal location for a covert meeting, thronged as it was with crowds from which two or three figures in conversation would not stand out. Today, however, the crowds were crowds of French soldiery. To meet there would have been brave, and when carrying out acts of sabotage in an occupied city, bravery is not a quality that goes hand in hand with success.
I skirted around the square, returning three times that evening, but saw no sign of Vadim, or Dmitry, or of any of the Oprichniki.
I returned to the house that I'd been staying in only to discover that it was already a temporary barracks for a dozen or so French officers. Wisely, I had not left those few possessions I had inside. Climbing up to the roof, I found the small bundle I had hidden there, along with my sword, safe and intact. None of those inside heard me as I retrieved them. I headed further south and found somewhat less luxurious, but still serviceable accommodation, which the French had decided was beneath them. I was not the first man in history, nor would I be the last, forced to sleep in a stable.
The following day, there was little I could do but wander around the city. Food was still reasonably abundant, but at a price. Those Muscovites who had stayed behind may have had numerous reasons for doing so, but for some there was a profit to be made. An invading army could, of course, simply requisition every item of food, every bottle of vodka and any other victuals that they desired, but though they would get what they consumed for nothing, it would also be the last they would get. A moving army can pillage, but a resting army must trade. It must employ others to go out of the city and resupply what it requires. This, at least, was the conventional wisdom. I believed it and, to my best estimation, Bonaparte believed it too. As ever, we had both underestimated the resolution of the Russian peasant. A few fresh supplies found their way into the city, but precious little. The French – and their horses – in the end had to survive on what was already stocked up in cellars and storehouses. It would not be enough. Had the French realized this, their stay in Moscow might have been even shorter – and that might indeed have saved them, if they had left in time to get out of Russia ahead of winter. Not all of the French army did understand the need for trade, but the few remaining Moscow tradesmen supplied those who did as well as, conveniently, supplying me. I suspect that, had I chosen to disguise myself as a French officer while I stayed in Moscow, then I could have fed myself at half the price. There were few discounts offered to an abandoned Russian butler.
Compared with two days ago, Moscow was once again teeming with life. Bonaparte's army was, at this stage in his campaign, perhaps 100,000 strong – appallingly fewer than the number that he started out with, but enough to give the city some pale shadow of revivification. Still they were fewer than half the true population of the city, but they spent more time out on the streets than had the real Muscovites, who had homes to go to, so Moscow seemed busy, superficially.
I remember once, when fighting south of the Danube, I surveyed through my spyglass an abandoned battlefield, scattered with the corpses of both friend and foe. Suddenly, I had seen movement. A soldier, lying on his back, his face covered with blood, whom everyone had taken for dead, was moving his hand. It had been the slightest of motions, made through the terrible pain of his injuries, but the fact that he could confront that pain and vanquish it sufficiently to make that feeble signal showed how much he wanted to indicate that he was alive – how much he wanted to live.
The field had still been under Turkish fire, but I had dashed out, oblivious to the shouts of my commanding officer, bending low as if it might save me from enemy gunshot. I had to rescue that poor, injured man. I made it to where he was and threw myself to the ground. I could hear the whizzing of bullets around me, but I don't think that they were aimed at me. My first intention was to murmur some words of encouragement into the soldier's ear; to let him know that if he wanted to live, then I was there to help him. Then I had to find a way to drag his weak body across the vast expanse of land that separated us from our own lines.
And then I saw his hand.
It was still moving, but the movement was not a desperate signal for assistance – the last plea of a dying man clinging to life – it was simply the wriggling of a hundred maggots. They had eaten most of his hand away, but their gluttonous writhing had, to the eyes of a man who had wanted to see life where there was none, seemed like a coherent motion; a twitching of the fingers that the maggots had long since assimilated.
In just such a way might the casual viewer conceive that life had in fact returned to Moscow. The streets were once again filled with vitality, with bustle, with commotion. But looking closely they would see that those figures that filled the streets, though they might on the surface look like the city's former inhabitants, were living on the city, not in it. Their purpose was to consume what they found (notwithstanding that trade rather than pillage might be a more efficient approach to the task of consumption), not to nurture for the benefit of their successors or for the benefit of the city itself.
Moscow was as full of life as a cadaver on the embalmer's table. The fluids and chemicals that had been introduced into its veins can engorge it sufficiently to give it some vague semblance of the living creature that it once was, but they would never have the ability to provide the vital essence that once made that body a man. The image brought to my mind the Oprichniki. They passed themselves off physically as men, but I had never seen in any one of them a hint of the desires and loves and anguishes of living beings.
Did the French occupiers, I wondered, perceive themselves as parasites feasting on the corpse of a once-great city, or did they believe that they were the vanguard of a new wave of life that had revitalized all the rest of Europe and was now supplying the physical reality of the Enlightenment to Russia? I think that Bonaparte himself probably believed that, but I also think he was deluding himself. Maks had shared Bonaparte's delusion.
It had been almost four hours since I had thought of Maks.
It was in the mid-afternoon of that day, the third of September, that I heard the first stories of fires raging in Moscow. I had invested in a substantial quantity of tobacco and was furtively offering it at an entirely unreasonable price to any French officer or soldier that I came across. The most unanticipated thing that I learned from this was that I had missed my calling. By the time I had sold scarcely a third of my stock, I had more than made back what I had paid for it. I understood how those few thousand who had remained in Moscow, however much they feared for their lives, must have been tempted by the profit that was to be had.
The profit which I was seeking was in the currency not of gold, but of knowledge. I still maintained the simplistic façade of a man who spoke no French, and so I was able to pick up all the news of plans and deployments that the French were discussing, as well as the gossip and tittle-tattle.
Fires were springing up all over Moscow. The French stories were that former convicts in the prisons of Moscow had been released and instructed by the departed governor, Rostopchin, to burn down the city, rather than let the French occupy it. The Muscovites I spoke to told, predictably, a different story: it was the French who were starting the fires, intent not just on occupying the city, not just on raping it, but ultimately on destroying it. This made little sense to me; no maggot could ever be pleased to see the corpse on which it fed cremated. Another point of view was that the fires were simply accidents. The French cared less for the city than did its inhabitants, so they would be less concerned about a toppled candle or a leaping cinder. In addition, with no civil authorities in place, there was no organization – nor any impetus – to put out any fire caused in such a way. Formerly, Moscow had been well stocked with hoses and pumps and men who knew how to operate them, but all had vanished with the evacuation. The Russians and the French stared at one another over the blazing city, each blaming the other, and neither was prepared to blink.
Among the stories about the fires, there were other rumours that I picked up; rumours that were frighteningly familiar; rumours that there was a plague in Moscow. And as I heard more of these rumours, the idea of a plague began to transform. The French were beginning to talk of strangulations, of disappearances, of a pack of wild animals.
The Oprichniki were doing their work. And yet I wondered if the two phenomena might not be related. The Oprichniki had no preconceptions of war, found no barriers of convention or custom that they would not cross. Perhaps the fires too were part of their unconventional solution to the goal of ejecting the French. I doubted whether I could have sacrificed the city itself to that goal, but the Oprichniki, as outsiders, had no such scruples. And so I might have failed where they would succeed. With the Oprichniki it was very easy (and very pleasing) to mortgage one's scruples, knowing that after the battle those scruples would be returned to one untouched – neither diminished nor consulted.
Tuesday's rendezvous was the church of Saint Clement, in the suburb of Zamoskvorechye, not so far from my new residence. Its priest had, it seemed, abandoned it and left Moscow, convinced that it was beyond his abilities to convert these invaders from their atheism to godliness, let alone to Christianity, let even more alone to the Orthodox religion.
I felt a chill as I gazed up at the church's red walls, feeling a sensation of menace that I imagine is not uncommon in even the most pious of men when encountering the overawing physical presence of such a building. A church, we all know from our earliest years, is the house of the Lord; a place of love and sanctuary. And yet the presentiment of horror and menace that I felt, huddled in the darkness of the gateway, lit only by the setting half-moon, must surely be one that is shared by all. I suppose it is because a church, however much we associate it with the love of Christ, is a place that we also associate with the dead. It cuts to the very heart of our belief. The bliss of paradise is the ultimate reward towards which the life of every Christian is directed, and yet how much do we all fear death? We fear death so greatly that we even fear those most incapacitated of creatures: the dead themselves.
I glanced around, but still saw no sign of Vadim or Dmitry, or indeed of any of the Oprichniki.
It seemed like only moments later when I looked around again, to find I had been joined by Ioann and Foma.