CHAPTER XXXII

IT WAS ALMOST A WALTZ THAT WE ENGAGED IN AS WE MADE OUR way through the morass of panicking men to the edge of the crowd. Each of us had grabbed hold of the other, not in the conventional pose to dance but holding tightly so that the other would not escape. We each pushed the other, neither realizing it, but both with the same intent; to be free of the crowd so that we could deal with one another alone.

As we emerged, we were released from the supporting pressure of the men and women around us and fell to the ground. We rolled down the steep bank towards the river's edge, with first one man on top and then the other, coming to rest in an icy puddle, which the tread of thousands of feet had kept liquid despite the freezing temperature all around. By luck, I ended up on top of Iuda, and gave him a blow to the jaw with my fist which I hoped would subdue any further fighting spirit in him. He was still in the uniform of a chef de bataillon, whereas I was a mere soldat – each of us overdressed in comparison with the multitude around us – but no one around seemed to question whether I should be treating my superior officer in such a way. On the far side of the river, the military hierarchy might reassert itself, but here, each man's soul was his own.

'I presume by now you're beyond believing me,' shouted Iuda, striving to be heard above the chaos around us.

'I've long been beyond that,' I lied. Suddenly a body of men erupted from the main throng like a hernia, redrawing the arbitrary lines that partitioned the crowd from the empty space around it. Hundreds surged through us and past us and out on to the ice, knocking me over and knocking Iuda from my grasp. I hauled myself up to my feet and, feeling the slippery surface beneath them, realized with dread that I too had been forced out on to the frozen river. Seven years ago, on Lake Satschan, I had felt the same terror. Today, supported above the waves not like Saint Peter by the will of God, but by a flimsy layer of frozen water, I stood my ground.

I looked around to try to recapture Iuda before he could disappear into the mob, but, through the thinning veil of frightened men and women who slipped and slid their way to the shore, I could see him, facing me and approaching me.

'But are you yet beyond disbelieving me?' he shouted through the crowd. He had not read my mind; he had simply understood it perfectly. I once heard a story of a chess-player – who was said to have studied under Philidor – who could write down his opponent's play for five moves ahead, but only if that opponent was a great player. Against a weaker opponent, he was consistently wrong. In truth, it was the opponent who was wrong, the master who was right. Iuda knew that at some point I would have come to the conclusion that his word was valueless in terms of the truth it represented, and therefore all the more powerful in the ideas that it suggested.

'I have to know,' I said. We were now face to face.

'I can't tell you,' he replied, with a smile of mischievous delight.

'You will!' As I spoke I grabbed his wrist and swung my foot against his shin, knocking his legs from under him. He writhed as he fell and succeeded in pulling me over too. The ice sheet dipped under our weight and we both slid towards the water. My grip on Iuda's wrist was now reciprocated by his on mine, but there was no grip that either of us could find on the glassy surface beneath us to halt our descent. A swathe of powdered ice sprayed into my face, sheared from the surface as Iuda dug in the teeth of his knife to slow our motion. He came to a halt on the very lip of the ice, but my impact into him knocked him a little further over, so that his legs dipped into the water.

Wriggling on my back, I kicked at the knife in his hand and it skated across the ice and over the edge, disappearing into the water with a plop. Iuda spread his hands and arms wide across the surface of the ice, trying to find purchase, trying to prevent himself from slipping into the cold, turbid water. But he was no voordalak, and did not have their ability to find a grip on the most polished of surfaces.

I regained my feet as he hung limply off the edge of the ice, now up to his chest in water and, with every movement he made, slipping in a little deeper.

'You can't let me die,' he said, not as a plea but as a statement of fact.

'Why not?'

'That way you'll never know.'

I stamped my foot firmly beside his hand. He grabbed it and clung to it, his arm wrapping around my leg like a serpent's tail.

'So,' I asked, breathing deeply and trying to calm myself now I had the upper hand, 'was it Margarita or Domnikiia you were with?'

He looked up at me with his head cocked slightly to one side. 'It was . . .' He paused in thought, as though he had been asked whether he would prefer beef or mutton for dinner. 'Margarita!' he announced with an air of decision. Then he yanked firmly on my leg, throwing me once again on to my back on the ice. As I began to slide once more towards the river, Iuda too had lost his only anchorage and his head disappeared beneath the surface.

The ice sheet beneath me began to tip and I found myself sliding even faster towards the water into which Iuda had just disappeared. I rolled on to my stomach and splayed my arms out wide, but just like Iuda, I could find little purchase. My right hand found a momentary grip, but the fingers of my left could do nothing. Within seconds I splashed into the water, going under and feeling a new coldness that infiltrated those last few parts of me that had been protected by my clothing. By the time I bobbed back to the surface, so had he.

'I can't lie to you any more, Lyosha,' he said, spitting out some of the water that had filled his mouth and swallowing the rest. 'It was Dominique.'

Once again he disappeared beneath the waves. I might have dived down to pull him back to the surface, but my concern now was more that the current was hurtling me towards the pillars of the bridge itself. I put my arms and legs out in front of me, but even then I could not protect myself entirely from the force of the impact. The wind was knocked out of me as my chest collided with the wooden support and my head bashed against it, almost knocking me out. Only some instinct told me to hold on to whatever I could grab, otherwise, weighed down by my wet clothes, I would have sunk straight to the riverbed.

Moments later, I was again fully conscious. I hauled myself up out of the water and entwined my legs around one of the beams. Looking to my left, I saw Iuda also climbing out of the water on to the substructure of the bridge. His motion was like that of a newt, dragging itself from the slime of its watery habitat on to dry land. He paused for a moment, panting, and only then looked around to see me advancing on him, stretching from pillar to beam across the wooden web that comprised the bridge's foundations.

Iuda ducked inside, crossing underneath the bridge. I followed, but made better ground, managing to get both to the other side of the bridge and closer to him. We were now dead centre in the river, about as far from one bank as from the other. Above our heads, hundreds of French were trampling one another in an attempt to get over to the right bank. Russian cannonballs splashed into the river around us. Stretching away from us to the south, the river flowed fast and free. Beyond this bridge, past what little the current had left of the shattered other bridge, there was nothing for miles. Somewhere, way downstream, there would be some other bridge against which all those dead who fell here would eventually congregate. If not, the Black Sea awaited them, far, far away.

Iuda leapt out into the water and I made a grab after him. With my left hand I just managed to get a hold of a clump of his filthy blond hair, whilst keeping myself anchored to the bridge with my right. With only two fingers and a thumb, it was hard to get a good grip, but his hair was long and soon I had it entwined. He was at my mercy, up to his neck in the water. I could duck him beneath it, pull him to safety, or let him go.

'Tell me the truth!' I screamed at him.

'I have told you the truth,' he replied, laughing despite his predicament.

'When?' I demanded. It was not a rhetorical question and he knew it. What I wanted to know was which of his two contradictory statements was true.

'Often,' was his only reply, again accompanied by a laugh.

I pushed him downwards under the water, counting the seconds to myself to be sure that he would not die. I pulled him back up and he gasped for breath, but never lost his smile.

'Tell me!' I screamed at him again.

'You can't torture me, Lyosha.' He raised his hand to clear the wet hair from his eyes. 'I have the ultimate protection that you'll never believe me. I've told you everything – not just everything that's true, but everything else as well. All I can offer you is the ultimate enlightenment; not just what is but what could be. To know everything is to know nothing. What's the point in asking any more? What's the point in forcing it out of me? You might as well torture a coin and expect it to turn up tails.'

I pushed his head back under the water. He was right. Many people choose to live by their reputation; Iuda chose to live by the lack of it. With my help, he had put himself in a situation where I could lend no credence to anything he said. However many times I dipped his head beneath the waves, he could change his answer. The final answer would never be the definitive one, because another different answer could always follow. I could put Iuda through the agonies of hell and he could scream 'Margarita' nine hundred and ninety-nine times and I would still not believe him, for fear that on the thousandth he would mutter 'Domnikiia'.

I pulled him back up to the surface, tightening my grip on his hair as though to pull it out of his scalp.

'You're slow today, Lyosha,' he said. 'Do you still think you can get the truth out of me?'

Silistria had taught me more than one thing about torture. It had taught me about being a victim, but I had also learned about being a perpetrator. I'd learned that it's not always about gaining information; sometimes it's an end in itself.

I shook my head and waited for the look in his eyes that showed he realized that the torture was over. The instant I saw it, I pushed his head back under and began to count again. He knew that, this time, I was not intending to pull him back up again. He had chosen a game that led to his own destruction; chosen to lose with a clever move rather than survive through a mundane one. As I counted the seconds, he struggled to break free; past ten, past twenty, thirty and forty. Then he quietened. It was not long enough for a man to drown – I knew he was bluffing. My hand was so cold I could scarcely feel his head beneath it. I squeezed tighter, unable to feel even pain and wondering if I might be breaking my own fingers by gripping so tightly. After about a minute he began to struggle again and then a convulsion ripped through his body. Had that been his final, irresistible, instinctive attempt to breathe, when the urging of his lungs overcame the knowledge that he was surrounded not by air but by water? Afterwards, he moved no more.

I waited for a further minute with my numbed arm plunged deep into the river before I raised it to look into his face. He was gone. A clump of trailing blond hairs was left curled around in my insensible fingers, but of the rest of him there was no sign. His body had been ripped from my numb, frozen hand by the torrent of the river. I looked out downstream, but it was an impossible task to distinguish one lifeless, floating corpse from another. Amongst them, a few swimmers even now made it to the safety of the western shore, but I did not see Iuda amongst those either.

I pulled myself back in, underneath the bridge, my knees hunched up against my chest as I listened, troll-like, to the tramp, tramp, tramp of feet above my head. I began to shiver. The layers of clothing that I wore were all wet through. If I were to leave my hand at rest for too long against some piece of the bridge's structure, it might freeze there. I crawled back along under the bridge to the eastern bank of the river. Thousands still remained to cross, but it was now unlikely that many more would. The Russian troops under Kutuzov and Wittgenstein were closing in.

I headed south along the riverbank, quickly discarding my French greatcoat. The choice was between death from the cold or from a Russian bullet. I chose not on the basis of preference but of likelihood, and it was a close-run thing. As I continued downriver, those few Russian patrols I encountered were convinced by a few words from me. The even fewer French I met were just as easily convinced when they heard their own language.

Before long, I came to Borisov, the town abandoned by Bonaparte but a few days before. Now Bonaparte was heading back west. How much of his army made it with him was open to question, but he himself would surely get back to Paris. I had no further desire to chase him, nor to chase any other Frenchman. And if Iuda were somehow still alive, I did not have the desire to pursue him, or even find out for sure if he was dead or not. He was out of Russia, or very soon would be – whether swept south, downriver to the Black Sea, or swept west with the Grande Armée to Poland and beyond. He was no longer my problem. My problems were those that he had left with me.

Though it was still dark when I reached Borisov, I was lucky enough to be able to find a horse, left forgotten as the French rushed north. I mounted it and headed out of the town.

Bonaparte would struggle on for a few more years and would even, it would transpire, rise as a brief phoenix before his ultimate finale, but here in Russia his defeat had begun. It was not a defeat that I had taken any part in. I had fought Bonaparte at Austerlitz and we had lost. I had fought him at Smolensk, and we had lost. After Borodino I had found another battle to fight. If my grandchildren one day were to ask me how I helped in the downfall of Napoleon, I would be unable to tell them the truth. I could tell them of Maksim and of Vadim and Dmitry and of how we had fought together in unorthodox ways on and off for seven years, but I could never tell them how it had ended. I could never tell them how Dmitry had frozen to death and how he had been lucky compared to Vadim and how even Vadim had been lucky compared to Maksim. For although both Vadim and Maksim had died a similar death, Maks had the added weight of knowing that he had been sent to it by those he thought to be his friends.

The doubt about Domnikiia which Iuda had so guilefully insinuated into me was, I now understood, easy to cope with. It was Maks who had suggested the solution to me. It was a matter of faith. Faith, Maks had said, allows us to feel certain about things that we can never know for sure. I could never discover whether it had been Domnikiia or Margarita with Iuda – that was knowledge that could never be known – but it was clear what I wanted the truth to be. All I had to do was have faith in my chosen view of reality. It would not be easy, certainly not for a man like me, to maintain such faith, but the fact that it meant I could be with Domnikiia would make the effort worthwhile. Every day on which my faith was rewarded would in its turn strengthen that faith – and strengthen my need for that faith. I would not, however, be seeing Domnikiia quite every day.

The town of Borisov holds an interesting geographical position in Russia. It stands on one corner of an equilateral triangle, of which the other two vertices are Moscow and Petersburg. From here it was as far to Petersburg as it was to Moscow, and it was as far again from one to the other.

I could weigh myself down now with the choice of which one to go to, and I would not even attempt to fool myself that it was a choice between two cities – it was a choice between Domnikiia and Marfa. It did not matter which road I chose now – Moscow or Petersburg – I would still be able to travel at will between the two. I knew that I could never give up Domnikiia, simply because I did not want to. I knew that I would never abandon Marfa, not only because I would never abandon my son, but because I knew that my love for her was always inside me, waiting to be rekindled whenever I chose to let it. I spurred my new horse and headed off under a red sky, just beginning to be lit in the east.

Birds began to awaken to the new dawn and, to the sound of their song, the nightmare began to fade. My country had faced five hundred thousand invaders. I had faced just twelve. We had both won. We would both recover. But, unlike Russia herself, when I was to look back on the events of the autumn and winter of the year 1812, I would not feel the blood coursing in my veins, my heart swelling in my bosom and my lip quivering at the recollection of honours past. Oh, I would shed a tear for my fallen friends. But, unlike my country, I would feel no pride.