Red Icon (21 page)

News of the Cheka’s approach reached the Skoptsy village only a few hours before the agents were due to arrive.

In the minds of the inhabitants, there could be only one reason for this visit – the whereabouts of their sacred icon had somehow reached the ears of Bolsheviks.

In the deal arranged by Rasputin, the Skoptsy had agreed to transport a delegation of Russian dignitaries to a secret meeting with their German counterparts, in order to begin preliminary peace negotiations between the two countries. After living for generations as outcasts from society, there was scarcely a back road in the country that the Skoptsy did not know. In exchange, the Tsarina Alexandra agreed to relinquish
The Shepherd
.

Obtaining the icon had long been a dream of the Skoptsy, and Rasputin had guessed correctly that there was nothing they would not do to get their hands on it.

For the task of smuggling these men through the battle lines, the Skoptsy elders chose a newcomer among their ranks: a man who spoke both Russian and German and was equally at home in either culture.

His name was Stefan Kohl.

In July of 1915, he set out in a carriage through the Austrian lines, bearing his cargo of Russian diplomats and generals. Even though the dignitaries ordered him to turn back before they reached their destination, the Tsarina held up her end of the bargain. At a rendezvous on the Potsuleyev Bridge in Petrograd, Stefan received the icon from Father Detlev, another Skoptsy whom Rasputin had involved in the plot. Before he had a chance to leave the city, however, Stefan received word from Rasputin that the Tsar’s personal investigator, the Emerald Eye, was already in pursuit of the lost icon.

Fearing that he would never make it out of Petrograd with Pekkala on his trail, Stefan followed the Emerald Eye and attacked him in the alley behind the Gosciny Dvor, nearly losing his life in the process. That same day, he boarded the Siberian Express train, eventually reaching Markha, the last remaining Skoptsy settlement, where he delivered the icon to the elders of the village.

To many of these elders, it had been a mistake to bargain with Rasputin for possession of the icon, however much they wished to possess it. The Tsarina’s plan to make the world believe that
The Shepherd
had been destroyed could not last forever. Sooner or later, blame would fall upon the Skoptsy for the icon’s disappearance. Now, with Cheka agents on their way from Irkutsk, it seemed as if their worst fears were coming true.

A council was hurriedly called by the leader of the village, a jowly man named Istvan Kor, to decide what might be done to save the icon. The meeting soon deteriorated into a loud and bitter argument. Some were for leaving it where it was now, hidden in a secret chamber dug deep into the permafrost beneath their own church here in Markha. Others voted to destroy the icon, knowing that the Bolsheviks had already begun selling the country’s priceless relics at auction houses in London, New York and Paris, in order to bankroll their revolution. Better to have it vanish from the earth, they said, than for it to hang as a trophy on some banker’s parlour wall.

‘Or we could stop them!’ shouted Stefan Kohl.

His voice plunged them all into silence.

The old men turned to glare at him.

Kohl stood with his back against the wall of the dimly lit room where the meeting was being held, defiantly returning their stares.

If it had been anyone else speaking that way before the elders, he would have been silenced with an angry shout. But they respected Kohl. Or rather, they feared him. He was famous for his physical strength. It was known that he could kill a horse with a single punch, and could butcher a steer to pieces in a matter of minutes with the long knife he always carried with him.

‘Yes, you could stop them, perhaps,’ said a man in a heavy wool coat. His name was Nikolai Latkin. He was one of the oldest members of the settlement, and spent his whole life in terror of the world beyond the boundaries of his village. ‘But what about the ones who come after?’ he demanded. ‘And the ones who come after that? You know they will keep coming until we have been banished from the earth.’

‘Then are we to live on bended knees forever?’ shouted Kohl, looking from one man to the next.

‘Before God, yes,’ replied Lutukin.

‘And everyone else, so it seems,’ Kohl snapped back.

Now another man spoke up. His name was Pavel Zelenin. He had deep-set eyes and a wild crop of hair which bunched at the side of his head, like the leafy branches of a tree which had grown on a windy hill. Twenty years before, he had given up his practice as an accountant in Rostov and headed east to seek a better life among the Skoptsy. Arriving at the village to plead his case, Zelenin had omitted to inform the elders that his exit from Rostov had been precipitated by the discovery that he was about to be investigated for tax evasion. Secretly, he worried that this visit from the Cheka might have nothing to do with the icon but was, in fact, to arrest him for his crimes. In his paranoia, Zelenin suspected that there were people in this room who knew of his past, and who would gladly sacrifice him to the Cheka in order to save their own skins. ‘Why should we listen to you?’ he asked Stefan Kohl, hoping to steer attention away from himself. ‘You have only been here seven years. You are practically a stranger among us.’

Kohl turned and fixed Zelenin with a stare. ‘And in those seven years, I have done more for this village than you have done in twenty. I have earned my place here and the right to speak my mind to men like you, Zelenin.’

‘What you have said is true,’ said Anatoli Bolotov, the pilgrim who had brought Stefan to Markha. In the years since his return, he had gone blind and his eyes were like the meat of hard-boiled eggs. ‘We may soon need to choose between the icon and our lives,’ continued Bolotov. ‘For centuries, the Skoptsy have survived without the presence of
The Shepherd
among us, but what use is the icon to the Skoptsy if none of us are here to worship it?’

This was not the first time Kohl’s volatile nature brought him into conflict with the elders and Bolotov had spoken out in his defence. In return, Kohl had shown the old man many kindnesses, even fashioning for him a walking stick, with a top made from the polished ball of a deer’s femur bone. Although he never said so, there were times when Bolotov wondered if he had made the right choice bringing Stefan Kohl to Markha. Originally, he had hoped to bring new life and energy into this last outpost of their faith. Instead, he realised now, he had unwittingly welcomed into their midst a man who would never submit to the random acts of violence which had always been dealt out to the Skoptsy when outsiders came knocking at their doors. In his willingness to trade outrage for outrage, regardless of how outnumbered he was, Stefan Kohl had failed to grasp one of the absolute truths behind the Skoptsy faith – that they could not win this fight to which they had been challenged by the world. The best they could do was survive it.

Through all of this, Istvan Kor had said nothing at all. Now, at last, he spoke. ‘There is no need for blood,’ he told the gathering. Then, turning to Kohl, he said, ‘Go to the road beyond the village. Take whatever men you need. Cut down some trees and block the way. That will stop the Cheka for a while. It is already late in the day. They will not spend the night out here alone and they will not continue on foot. They will have to turn back and by the time they return, if they return at all, we will have made the right decision, instead of one come to in haste.’

Kohl did not wait for the approval of the others. He dashed from the room, rounded up a dozen of his friends and set out in a cart. An hour’s ride from the village there was a sharp bend in the road where a small, plank bridge crossed a stream known locally as Beggar’s Brook. Here, they stopped. Kohl and his men piled off the wagon, axes in their hands, ready to fashion a barricade and then retreat back to the town.

But before the first tree had even fallen, they heard the sound of an approaching car.

It was the men of the Cheka, riding in a battered Opel saloon which had once belonged to the Ekaterinburg merchant named Ipatiev, in the basement of whose house the Romanovs had been shot and stabbed to death.

After hours of nothing but forest, and still some distance from the village, the six Cheka men were stunned to find a group of men clustered in the road. The driver, moving at speed around the sharp bend, lost control of the car, which swerved and rolled upside down into the weed-choked stream. The four passengers who survived the crash jumped out, some with blood streaming down their faces from the shattered windscreen glass. These men drew their weapons and began firing wildly at the strangers. Two Skoptsy men fell dead.

For Kohl, the axe still in his hand, there was now no choice about what had to be done. In the ensuing fight the remaining Cheka agents were massacred.

The following morning, a second detachment of Cheka arrived at Beggar’s Brook and discovered the Opel saloon still upside down in the stream. It had not rained in the night and the road was still splashed with blood from the fighting of the day before. The bodies were gone, hastily buried in shallow graves not a stone’s throw from the road. The Cheka did not wait around to search for them. Instead, they sped back to their headquarters in Irkutsk and reported their findings to Dzerzhinsky. The Cheka leader immediately declared war upon the Skoptsy, and personally set out to punish those who were responsible for the deaths of his agents.

By then, Kohl and the other men who had taken part in the massacre were already fleeing for their lives. Pursued by the Cheka, some lasted only weeks, hauled from carts and river barges on which they’d begged for transport. These men were executed on the spot, and the ears were cut from their heads as the proof of their deaths, a ritual which Dzerzhinsky himself practised on those whom he had liquidated.

Others reached the cities of Tobolsk, Tyumen and Zlatoust, where the Skoptsy had always been met with suspicion. One by one, they were betrayed to informants, who collected rewards for their capture.

By January of 1922, only Stefan Kohl was left.

Returning to the office on Pitnikov Street from her visit to Archive 17, Elizaveta found her husband and Pekkala leaning up against the window, each of them armed with a pair of binoculars and peering down into the street. Their elbows rested on the windowsill, its multicoloured layers of paint chipped away in many places so that it resembled a map of a different world.

‘What about that one?’ asked Kirov.

‘That’s one of Stalin’s people,’ exclaimed Pekkala. ‘He’s been watching this place for the past two days.’

‘That one then! I’ve seen him before.’

‘That’s your driver Zolkin!’ Pekkala scolded the major. ‘Have you even got those things in focus?’

Leaving their binoculars upon the windowsill, the two men slumped down in their chairs.

‘He must have known that he would only get one chance to steal back the icon,’ said Pekkala, rubbing his tired eyes.

‘In which case,’ added Kirov, ‘he must be far from here by now.’

‘But where did he go?’ Pekkala wondered aloud.

‘I think I can help you with that,’ said Elizaveta. Neither of the men had heard her coming up the stairs and now they turned, startled by her presence.

‘Did you make it to the Archive?’ asked Kirov.

‘I did,’ she told him, ‘and what is more, I found Comrade Vosnovsky quite cooperative once I told him who had sent me.’

Kirov rose up from his chair and embraced her. ‘My darling, you are as talented as you are beautiful!’

‘I told you she could do it,’ Pekkala announced with satisfaction. ‘I never doubted for a second.’

In spite of Elizaveta’s frequent and bewildered irritation with this man, she felt herself blushing with pride at Pekkala’s faith in her success.

Now she told them what she had learned. ‘The Skoptsy were wiped out, at least according to Dzerzhinsky. I saw it written in his own hand. And the last of them was Stefan Kohl, whose family was deported to a village called Ahlborn in Germany just before the outbreak of the war in 1914.’

‘Ahlborn!’ said Pekkala. ‘That’s where they found the icon.’

‘Well, whoever brought it there,’ said Kirov, ‘it couldn’t have been Stefan Kohl. According to Dzerzhinsky, he died out in Siberia.’

‘But what if Dzerzhinsky was wrong?’ asked Pekkala, and as he spoke, he turned to Elizaveta. ‘Was Kohl’s body ever recovered?’

‘As a matter of fact, it was not,’ she admitted.

‘Then maybe Kohl is alive, after all,’ said Kirov. ‘But how could Dzerzhinsky have made such a mistake?’

The bullet fired from Dzerzhinsky’s broom-handle Mauser smashed into Stefan’s right shoulder blade, throwing him face down into the thin layer of snow which covered the half-frozen lake.

He felt the cold on his face, but there was no pain – only a blurred, thrumming sensation as he drifted into shock.

Feebly, he tried to get up, but his arms wouldn’t work. Turning his head to one side so he could breathe, he gazed with dream-like detachment out across the lake, towards the grey-brown haze of trees on the horizon. Some time later, he heard a car door slam and then the sound of its motor as Dzerzhinsky sped away up the road, bound for Cheka headquarters in Irkutsk.

In the time that followed – whether it was seconds, minutes or hours, Stefan had no idea – the profound silence of that winter’s evening settled on him. A terrible emptiness yawned open in his mind as he realised that the world was already moving on without him, relentless and uncaring. So this is what death feels like, thought Stefan; to understand how little you really matter to the universe.

The next thing he knew, he was lying on his back, looking up at the stars. He was choking. His throat felt as if it was on fire. He sat up and retched and, in that moment, he realised that he wasn’t alone.

An old woman squatted in the snow beside him. The shawl which she had pulled about her face was crusted with ice from the freezing condensation of her breath.

She held something out towards his face. ‘Again!’ she said, and a metal cup clinked against his teeth.

The fire blazed again inside his throat and now he tasted it – homemade alcohol of the type known as
samahonka
, flavoured with the buds of birch trees gathered in the summertime.

Once, more, he retched.

‘Keep it down, damn you!’ the old woman commanded. ‘It’s no use poured out in the snow.’

She tried to pour another dose into Stefan’s mouth.

He pushed her hand away. ‘Enough,’ he gasped.

‘Good!’ said the woman. ‘At least you can talk. Now, can you walk or do we have to drag you off the ice?’

‘We?’ he asked.

As if in answer to his question, a dog appeared from behind him. It was a huge Malamute and wore the rawhide leather traces of a sledge. The wolf-like animal panted in his face and then slapped him across the mouth with its warm and slimy tongue.

He knew this animal. Its name was Demetrius, and it belonged to Yuliya Belyakina, the ancient woman who crouched before him now. She lived at the edge of the Samarsk Lake, which was one of many tributaries of the mighty Lena River. Beyond it, almost hidden in the forest, lay the settlement of Markha.

By the time Dzerzhinsky caught up with Kohl, he had been on the run for many months. After learning the fate of the others who had been with him that day they attacked the Cheka agents, Kohl returned to Markha, gambling that this was the one place where no one would expect him to go.

Unknown to Stefan, he had been spotted as he passed through Irkutsk, on his way into the wilderness which surrounded the old Skoptsy village, and it was Dzerzhinsky himself who drove out to settle the score. Only an hour’s walk from the settlement, the Cheka leader caught up with the young Volga German.

Yuliya Belyakina, the Skoptsy woman who found Kohl half frozen on the lake, had never lived in Markha. Her husband had once kept pigs, which supplied the village with fresh meat. When he died, Belyakina sold the pigs and stayed on at the remote dwelling, preferring to remain separate from the community, yet still a member of it.

Belyakina had been out checking her rabbit traps when she heard a shot echo across the lake. She waited until it was dark, and the temperature had dropped below freezing, before venturing out on to the ice to investigate the reason for the gunfire.

When she came across Stefan, lying face down in the snow, he was the first person she had seen in months.

She heaved the injured man on to her sledge, which had been cut by her late husband from a single piece of wood. Then, with the help of her dog, she hauled Kohl back to her cabin.

That night, with a pair of long-nosed pliers normally reserved for removing fish hooks from the gullets of the pike and perch she caught in the lake, Belyakina pulled the bullet from Stefan’s shoulder.

At the time, Stefan was still suffering from hypothermia and so dazed that he was barely aware of what took place. ‘I must get to the village,’ he told Belyakina. ‘I must tell them what happened.’

‘They know,’ she replied, swabbing his head with a damp cloth. ‘Go when you are feeling better.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said.

Slowly, his wounds began to heal. In time, the nightmares faded. The only thing that never left him was that peculiar sensation of emptiness, which he had felt when he was lying in the snow. It was as if, for a moment, a curtain had been drawn back and he had glimpsed something normally too vast and horrifying to be held within the scaffolding of human thought – the terrible obliviousness of the universe to the fate of everything contained within it.

The spring thaw came, and with it the season of mud. The ice in the rivers broke up with a sound like cannon fire. Birds began to reappear. The world turned green again.

‘Come with me,’ Belyakina said one day. ‘It is time that we went to the village.’

Stefan followed her along a series of winding trails until they arrived at Markha.

And suddenly Stefan understood why Belyakina had been in no hurry to bring him to the village.

Markha was gone.

The place had been burned to the ground. Only blackened chimneys remained, like sentinels guarding the places where the houses had once stood.

‘I couldn’t tell you,’ explained Belyakina, ‘not until you were strong enough, and then I knew you’d have to see it for yourself.’

It was three days after the murder of the Cheka men that soldiers had arrived from Irkutsk, bringing with them half a dozen trucks, and orders to obliterate the village. The elderly were shot. The animals were shot. Anyone who showed resistance was also shot. Shouting through a bull horn, an officer ordered the survivors to climb aboard the vehicles while, one by one, the houses were set on fire. While the town burned, barrel loads of salt were scattered on the small and tidy plots where cucumbers, turnips, beets and potatoes had been planted. Before they left, the soldiers heaped the bodies of the dead into a pile and burned them, too.

Belyakina’s house, being at some distance from the village and hidden away among the trees, was not discovered. She had stood in her doorway, watching flames light up the evening sky and, later, she heard the trucks departing.

Belyakina waited until the sky above the village was no longer darkened by smoke. Then she went into the village, carrying a shovel, and buried the fire-splintered bones of the dead among the dust of ash and salt.

Within a week, those who had been taken prisoner were sent to labour in the goldmines at Kolyma, where life expectancy was less than one month. Some lasted longer than that, but eventually all of them perished.

Speechless, Stefan wandered among the ruins. In a heap of charred timbers, he found the remains of the walking stick he had made for Bolotov after the old man went blind. As he surveyed the destruction, he felt a rage building in his mind which he knew he would never be able to control.

He walked back to where Belyakina waited for him on the dead and salted earth.

‘What has become of the icon?’ he asked. Until that day, he had thought it was still safely hidden in the church at Markha.

Beluyakina did not speak, but only reached out and took hold of his arm.

In silence, they walked back to her house.

When they arrived, Belyakina went over to her bed, knelt down and pulled from under it a flat, rectangular object wrapped in cloth. ‘On the day you left to block the road, Istvan Kor came here and gave this to me for safekeeping.’

‘And you hid it under your bed?’ Stefan asked incredulously. ‘Did you really think it would be safe there?’

‘You’ve been in this house for weeks and never thought to look,’ replied Belyakina.

‘Thank God the Cheka didn’t find it!’ exclaimed Stefan.

‘As it turns out,’ said the woman, ‘they weren’t even looking for the icon.’

The news stunned him. ‘Then why were they coming to Markha?’

‘To investigate rumours of grain hoarding.’

‘Do you mean to say that all of this could have been avoided?’

‘Perhaps.’ The old woman shrugged. ‘But who knows? They might have found it anyway. What’s done is done.’

‘And what do you intend to do with
The Shepherd
?’ asked Stefan. ‘Are you just going to put it back under your bed?’

‘No,’ she answered, handing him the icon. ‘I am giving it to you.’

It had been a long time since Stefan had set eyes on
The Shepherd
. Now, as he carefully removed the cloth, the bright blues and greens and whites of the painting seemed to jump from the flat surface and to shimmer in the air, illuminated by the dim glow of the fat-burning lamps Belyakina used to light the cabin.

‘What you hold in your hands,’ said Belyakina, ‘is all that remains of our world. If
The Shepherd
is destroyed, then so are we. From this moment on, whether you like it or not, you are the keeper of our faith.’

‘I will be more than that,’ he told her. ‘I’ll make the people of this country pay for what they did to us.’

‘Be patient,’ cautioned Belyakina. ‘Now is not the time for vengeance. When that day comes, you will know it. In the meantime, you must leave this place. Soon the roads will be passable again. Hunters will come to the woods and fishermen to the lake. It is only a matter of time before one of them spots you and the Cheka learn that you aren’t dead after all. Go, and take
The Shepherd
with you.’

‘But where?’ asked Stefan. ‘There’s no one left out there who I can turn to.’

‘There may still be someone,’ said Belyakina. She tottered on stiff legs to the window and removed an old book from its resting place upon the sill. It was a cookbook, with a publication date of 1890. The lettering that had been stamped upon its cover had all but faded away, leaving only a faint glint of the embossing, like a sprinkle of gold dust. Belyakina shook the book upside down, and a piece of paper fell out. Written on one side was a recipe for baked carp.

‘Light that candle,’ she told Stefan, nodding at a stump of wax upon her bedside table.

Stefan did as he was told.

Belyakina held the sheet above the candle, so that the glow of the flame showed as a yellow ball through the paper. As the seconds passed, a curious brown stain began to slither across the back of the page, as if worms were crawling through it from the other side.

‘There,’ said Belyakina, handing him the document. ‘That is where you’re going.’

Stefan took the page, still warm from the candle, and saw, in the brown letters, the name of a man, Anatoly Argamak, and an address somewhere in Moscow.

‘How did you do this?’ asked Stefan. ‘How did these letters appear?’

‘It is an ink made from a mixture of alum powder and vinegar,’ she explained, ‘which is used for pickling fruits and vegetables. Copies of all our sacred prayers were written down this way, in books too insignificant for men like the Cheka, or the Okhrana before them, to examine. Of course, no one imagined that they would burn the whole village to the ground.’

‘And who is this man Argamak?’ asked Stefan.

‘One of us.’

‘There is a Skoptsy commune in Moscow?’

She laughed at him. ‘If that were true, it wouldn’t be there long. No, Argamak lives on his own and when you meet him, you’ll know why. In the past, members of our faith who were wanted by the law could go to him and he would take them in. If anyone can help you now, it’s Argamak.’ Then she fetched out a handful of coins from a hole in her mattress. ‘You may as well have these. They’re no use to me any more.’

‘But Moscow?’ argued Stefan. ‘That city is crawling with Bolshevik agents! It won’t take five minutes for them to spot me.’

‘They won’t be looking for you,’ answered Belyakina. ‘As far as they’re concerned, you’re lying at the bottom of a lake.’

The next day, pulling a cart which had belonged to Belyakina’s husband, Stefan set off towards the west. One week later, he arrived on the outskirts of Irkutsk, where he bought a horse with the money Belyakina had given him.

In the months ahead, when Stefan’s money ran out, he would hire himself out as a butcher, the only trade he knew, until he had earned enough to move on.

One thing Stefan learned in his travels was that the less people knew about the world, the more certain they were that they alone deserved dominion over it. He learned to hide his true identity, far away inside himself, and to become, at least on the surface, precisely what people expected him to be. Like a wandering magician, he mastered the art of concealment. He wore a constantly changing mask which caused people to remark, even at their first meeting with him, that it was as if they’d always known him.

Sometimes, when Stefan found himself alone, out on the steppe near Penza, or resting in a field of young sunflowers on the road to Arzamas, or camped out in the bulrushes on the banks of the River Bug, he would take the icon from its hiding place beneath the seat of his cart and stare and stare at it until the colours and the figures seemed to flow together into something that was not of this earth.

On 30 October 1922, six months after setting out from Markha, Stefan finally arrived in Moscow.

There, he found Argamak working as a gravedigger at the Kalitnikowska Cemetery, not far from Lenin Station.

Argamak was a short, moon-bellied man with a bull neck and fleshy lips. He wore mud-plastered boots and coarse wool trousers patched with leather at the seat and on the knees. His grey shirt, on which the dried sweat showed as hazy blooms of salt, had come untucked. He gave the impression of a man so disgusted with mankind that he could barely acknowledge his own membership among the human race, and so preferred to live among the dead.