Field of Mars (33 page)

‘Stay if you want,' she said. She could hear the other girl moaning around the corner.

‘No . . . no . . .' A shy man. Or maybe he was afraid, or too old, or too drunk.

She walked to the window while Evdaev saw the ambassador to the stairs, looked out on to the courtyard. It was as still as death. No birds, no breeze, no squirrels . . . Somewhere a door was closing.

‘Come here,' Evdaev said behind her, and she turned to see him naked. A strong man, a flat belly and big thighs.

‘You're in the cavalry aren't you,' she remembered, coming forward to meet him.

‘Take this off.' He began to pull the camisole away.

‘I enjoy riding too,' she said. She saw Artamonov come out of the turret and light a cigarette. He stood in the shadows and watched.

‘Good . . .'

She pushed Evdaev down on to the sofa and guided his cock into her. Began to rock back and forth while his fingers pinched her. She looked down at him and his face was blank, almost dazed, as if he were trying to put together a strange puzzle. She pushed harder, pulled his hands away.

‘I know who you are . . .' she said, said it cruelly, scaring him for a moment. ‘I know what you think . . . I know what you want . . .'

‘God . . .'

‘I know all your crimes . . . I know all your secrets . . .' Artamonov had come up to the sofa and was stroking himself.

‘I know both of you,' she said, looking up at Artamonov's blushing face.

And she went ahead and did what she had to do, and before the morning had arrived, she did it again. Until the men were asleep like pigs in a barnyard, curled up in a tangle, and she could retrieve her expensive foreign clothes and leave them to their snoring and their dreams.

THIRTY

They let her douche, and they let her bathe, and they let her sleep for a few hours. It was a long room with a window at the gable end with branches of trees scraping against the glass when the breeze came up. Little green buds trying to escape the chill; more promises, more waiting, she thought. The doctor came in and asked her if there was any blood. There wasn't. She'd got away easy, she told herself. They let her douche again, brought her some breakfast, and then they came in, hats in hand.

Fauré sat for a few moments looking at her. Tomlinovich looked around for a chair and then took up a post beside the window. Pyotr was gone. Who knew where. She'd been used. She knew that now. All along she had just been used. Dragged down by degrees, just look through the pictures, just play a little part, just tell me all you know. And now they were going to use her some more.

‘We need to go through it all, of course,' Fauré said. She watched the young one, the thin one with the glasses take out his pad and pencil.

And so . . . she went through it all, remembering each conversation, every mundane detail of the rooms above the Evdaev stables—‘It may have been one of their habitual meeting places,' Fauré explained.

So, she told him about the skins on the wall, the turret, the skylight in the turret . . .

They took a break. The woman brought her some tea. Everyone went to the lavatory. She wanted to ask where Pyotr was, but decided that she was not going to care about that any longer. She went back to the bed and got under the covers, and under the covers she just overflowed in tears. The woman came back to check on her, pulling the covers back but she knocked her hand away.

‘Go down and tell them I'm ready.'

She went over it again and again. A day went by. And then another. She looked at more pictures. Walked around the woods surrounding the little clinic with Sinazyorksy to guard her. They didn't talk, which was fine with her. She dredged up everything, sometimes she thought she manufactured the details out of her dreams. Still they listened to everything. There were stenographers who came and went in shifts. She was not to worry about her job, they told her. It didn't matter, she'd almost forgotten about all of that. And Larissa who she didn't blame at all. Not really.

And so, she told them all the little fragments, tried to remember the inflections, the attitudes. Told them about how there had been a statement that things were going to have to be moved up. Everything timed for the summer, all of it arranged through someone called
Apis
. A lot of animosity around PaȈsic, somebody named Sergei whose name kept coming up. No, they didn't suspect anything about Smyrba.

‘
Apis
. . . The bull,' Fauré said, leaning forward.

‘The bee, the bull . . .' Tomlinovich muttered from his post at the window. He must be a birdwatcher, she thought.

‘Well, whoever
Apis
is, he's in Belgrade, because Hartwig was going to speak to him when they returned.'

‘Speak to him?'

‘That's what he said, speak. They were ready to have a meeting.'

‘Speak . . .' Fauré muttered.

When they finished there were no goodbyes. They just left the room with serious expressions, and it ended with her getting dressed and being driven across the city to her place on Sadovaya. She went in and sat in the empty rooms, soaked in a bath, and then walked up the street to the club thinking that she didn't want to be alone.

Inside Kushner was lecturing them again. He called it poetry but really it was a long list detailing the many failures of the Romanov autocracy, without, of course, saying anything that might get him arrested. One had to always remember to be careful, even if there was supposedly no censorship. In front of him Tika, the cat, had been enclosed in an intricately designed metal cage, on trial for its life. Kushner explained that any animal would do; a chicken, a hawk, a double-headed eagle . . . No double-headed eagles being available, today Tika would be standing in. There were less than a dozen people in the audience.

 

‘. . . for those who actually do the work that causes the beast of the state to continue in its lumbering pace. For those whose blood is the grease within the bloody machine. For those who, after being told there was light, still refused to look up . . . for those who believed they would go to hell if . . . for those who knew they would be beaten if . . . for those who knowing and were still afraid and could not continue because . . . for all those who—'

 

No, the Komet was only marginally a political club. Those who considered themselves firebrands might stop by for a look-in, but the art was too artistic, the issues too vaguely drawn, they reported. To talk about anything substantial one had to find a place where one could talk freely, not a café. A friend's apartment where there were no police informers listening to your fantastical plans to bomb the Winter Palace.

She felt sick. Maybe it was the weather. Maybe it was the life.

She went in, smiled, embraced, moved to the back of the room. Dropped in and out of conversations, glanced at the headlines. There had been seventeen suicides over the weekend, including a boy who'd taken poison.

She listened to Kushner, but from the moment she heard about the boy, she couldn't stop thinking about it. Just the idea of it lodged in her mind. Thinking about how it would have hurt, how he would have twisted and writhed as the chemicals tore at his insides.

Poison.

It was not the way she would plan it. Lately she couldn't stop thinking about death. In her latest plan she had decided to wait until the weather got cold again, drink her head off and then go out to the centre of the Troitsky Bridge where there was a good current and hop over the side. The cold would numb her, the drink would calm her and the river would just . . . take her. And, with a bit of luck, perhaps it would be beautiful. Scenic, with silvery moonlight or a slow snowfall, and warm downlighting provided by the lanterns on the bridge. That was the way she was imagining it, floating down through the icy water before the weight of her clothing dragged her under, one last look at the stars . . .
tryn-trava
—who cares?

Kushner did. Kushner cared very deeply and now he had talked Larissa into caring too. They were Bolsheviks, Maximalists they called themselves, and had begun obsessively reading everything they could get their hands on that was even remotely seditious. One night, giggling, tipsy, Larissa lifted up the floorboards in Kushner's filthy bedroom, took out something wrapped in a remnant of red serge, started to unwrap it. For one queasy moment as the red cloth was unwrapped Vera saw the wooden handle like a dildo with its little iron ring, and she thought Larissa wanted something else. And then the cloth came all the way away and she saw it was a pistol.

‘It's called a Mauser . . .' Larissa breathed.

An ugly thing, smuggled across the border by a student; all squares and angles, a pistol designed by an abstract artist. Something you might use to kill Martians. They had fourteen bullets they kept knotted in a silk handkerchief and neither of them had ever fired it. Well, where could they? They practised cleaning it and taking it apart blindfolded, then they'd wrap it up and put it under the floor again.

It didn't matter what Vera said, Larissa was too far gone.

‘Don't say I didn't warn you,' Vera had told Larissa. ‘All these books could land you in Kresty with some girls who won't be as gentle with you as I was,' she'd said, giving her a little tweak on the tit just to drive the point home. Because that was what was going to happen. Kushner was going to sink them all.

‘You should think for once, think about who you are for once,' was all Larissa had said, not even laughing and that somehow made it worse.

Oh, sure, sure, it all made sense. Of course it all made sense. Did they think that she actually believed in the divinity of the Romanov dynasty? Or the sanctity of the ‘pure' church? And of course something had to change, something had to give. Everybody knew that. And everyone had someone they wanted to get back at, didn't they?

It was a war, a war between different classes of people, between rich and poor, healthy and lame, smart and stupid. Kushner's solution was to hang them all from lampposts. A list that included, well . . . everybody—the members of the Duma, the judges, the lawyers, all the owners and managers, investors, bankers, accountants. But then who would be left to run things? That was easy; he'd turn it all over to the peasants, the only people who really understood the soil, the only representatives of the authentic heart of Russia.

She thought he felt that way because he'd never really spent any time with peasants. He had a picture of them in his mind that made it all much prettier than it was.

Well, she'd spent as little time with the peasants as she could. On a couple of occasions she had actually been inside a
izba
, really just a little piled-up box of mismatched logs, covered with sod. A dark, smoke-filled stinking hole where an entire family lived and died, and then the next generation did it all over again. If that was the authentic heart of Russia, she wanted no part of it, thank you very much.

 

‘. . . the bliss of making the new man who will walk proudly among his brothers . . .'

 

The cat had tried to curl up and go to sleep, but she saw that Kushner had designed the cage to be just a little too small. The poor animal could barely turn around, and Kushner had the annoying habit of slapping the podium at the end of each stanza, so the cat, with no rest, was growing peeved at the whole exercise.

Larissa was seated at the corner of the stage. Looking up at her man with a rapt expression, her clear, open face almost radiant. Like a saint, Vera thought. Maybe she was going to become the saint of the Bolsheviks. Maybe Kushner was treating her well, it was hard to say. They were very private.

 

‘. . . not shirk from the spilling of the blood of the god . . . not to shirk from looking into the broken mirror . . . to hold up the idols and the ikons and the idiots and say . . .

“Parasites! Vermin! Anathema!”'

 

Kushner was yelling his phrases now. Cursing and screaming. Izov had come around from behind his luxurious bar and was frowning at the reading. Well, it would be over soon, she thought. And indeed after another few imprecations, came the non-climax and the poor cat stood condemned before them all.

There was a splatter of applause and she took the opportunity to escape the Komet, getting out almost as quickly as she'd come in, started walking up to the public library, idling through the market until she came out on Sadovaya Street; steering herself vaguely towards the Nevsky. Maybe she could lose herself window-shopping for things that were impossibly expensive. She didn't want to be noticed. She was tired of being looked at and sought after. Tired of making herself into someone who was fabulously enticing. Tired of looking like someone's erotic vision; tired of trying to be appreciated all the time by people she didn't even know or care about.

Tired of being a bloody good bitch.

It was the long-promised spring come round at last. The leaves were breaking open, the rains were washing the filth of the winter away into the canals. She sniffed the air like a dog, a remarkably fresh day and underneath it all the scent of wood smoke, and the sharper tang of burning coal from the little steamers that wafted along the streets. No, it wasn't quite cold enough to jump in the Neva, she thought. The idea, the whole point, was to be numb.

She passed a dress shop and stopped for a moment looking at the mannequins and the clothes they displayed. She could wear anything up there and look good. In the weeks leading up to the Yusupov party she had made some money appearing in a really absurd show. A sort of musical extravaganza at the Alexandra Theatre of all places, and after another week she'd be able to afford anything they put up in their windows. She was doing well, she was doing just fine. Better than expected. Much better. Not as well as when she was working for Madame, but then again she didn't have to pretend to like putting her face in some other girl's ass.