The Cleansing Flames (25 page)

An explosion of laughter accompanied Dolgoruky’s entrance to the apartment. Virginsky waited tensely for his appearance in the drawing room. He was suddenly aware that he had sobered up completely. At that moment, it seemed unlikely to him that he would ever drink vodka again.

Prince Dolgoruky stepped into the room with a faintly mocking smile on his face, as if he was struggling to take the whole thing seriously. It was also apparently impossible for him to suppress entirely the aristocratic disdain with which he habitually greeted everything – and everyone – he encountered. There was no sign of the tormented side of his Byronic nature, the devil-haunted individual Virginsky had briefly glimpsed at their last encounter.

Dolgoruky was accompanied by a much younger woman. Whether they had arrived together by accident, or whether Dolgoruky had brought her with him, was not clear. An instinct for jealousy inclined Virginsky to prefer the former explanation. Virginsky felt that he had seen the woman’s face before. Perhaps she simply conformed to a type that was becoming familiar to him. She was physically attractive, although not in an easy or approachable way. There was something guarded and even aloof about her gaze, which was accentuated by an unusually long neck. He was sure he had not seen her at the offices of
Affair
. It was some time before that, perhaps long ago. He had the sense that she had changed enormously since the last time he had seen her, and that she would not have appreciated being reminded of it. He sensed the wariness in her assessment of him, and the flicker of alarm when something like recognition showed on her face. She was someone he had encountered in his official duties, he felt sure of that.

In the event, he was denied the opportunity of giving it any further thought. Dolgoruky approached him with a jabbing finger. ‘I know this man. He is a magistrate. Did you know that, Kirill Kirillovich?’

‘Yes. Botkin brought him here.’

‘Botkin? Is this wise?’

‘He is sympathetic to the cause. He wishes to help us. A magistrate could be very useful to us.’

‘He was snooping around asking questions about Kozodavlev. Leastways his superior was. A most eccentric individual. He claimed I did not interest him!’

Virginsky sensed Botkin and Kirill Kirillovich regard him with a new and dangerous interest. ‘It’s true,’ he confessed. ‘We
were
investigating the death of Kozodavlev, in connection with a body found in the Winter Canal. The body of Pseldonimov. The secret information I gave to you, Alyosha Afanasevich, relates to that case. The fact of the matter is that we are no longer working on it. It has been taken from us. As I told you, Rakitin is in the hands of the Third Section. I have never hidden from you my position as a magistrate. On the contrary, I have shared with you useful information acquired through that position.’

‘The information he gave me was, in fact, of limited usefulness.’ There was a chilling finality to Botkin’s utterance. It had the ring of a sentence being pronounced.

‘You see what you have done!’ cried Kirill Kirillovich, in sudden panic. ‘What kind of a man you have brought here! You have put us all in danger.’

Virginsky felt as if the room was closing in on him. Many of the guests had risen from their seats. They were pressing forward in response to their host’s shrill cries. He noticed a vindicated smile on the face of the young man who had admitted them.

‘What do you propose we do with him?’ asked Botkin darkly.

‘That is a question for you to answer,’ bleated Kirill Kirillovich. ‘You brought him here.’

Virginsky felt that his fate was being decided, and that the decision would not go his way.

‘Wait!’ It was the voice of the woman who had entered with Dolgoruky, clear and naturally authoritative. She seemed to turn the mood of the gathering with just one word. ‘Let me ask you outright: What are you proposing? That we kill this man and dispose of his body?’

Now that she had expressed the matter with such chilling and almost gleeful directness, it seemed that the others began to back away from the idea. They were suddenly desperate for her to talk them out of it.

‘Let me tell you, if that is what you’re thinking, you are no worse than a gang of common criminals. We did not instigate the revolution in order to give men like you the licence to commit violent acts. Yes, we will be ruthless when the time comes. We will strike, and we will strike hard. If a head needs cutting off, I will be first in line with an axe. But we must choose our targets carefully. An ill-considered attack, prompted by panic, and executed without due diligence, can only serve to bring us to the attention of the authorities.’

She broke off to consider Virginsky. A wrinkle of distaste upset the balance of her face. ‘This man may be a police agent, but I doubt it. Really, would even our police be so stupid as to send a serving magistrate to infiltrate a revolutionary grouping? I have had some experience of spies and informers, you know. In Paris, during the Commune. Invariably, it turns out to be the one you would least suspect. If you want to find the agent amongst us – and yes, you may be sure that there is already an agent amongst us, and has been long before this young man’s appearance – there is no great mystery to it. You simply look for the man who most exemplifies the common stereotype of a revolutionist. Botkin is more likely to be a police spy than him. Or Totsky,’ she added, as if to lessen the implicit accusation she had made against Botkin. The afterthought caused the young ‘Bazarov’ to blush, indicating to Virginsky that he was the Totsky she had referred to. ‘The police – or the Third Section, or whoever wishes to infiltrate us – would naturally want their agent to fit in, not to stand out, as this fellow so pitiably does. Why, he did not even bother to get out of his service uniform!’

Her observation, facetiously made, provoked mocking laughter from the other guests. With it, the tension was released.

The young woman had possibly saved Virginsky’s life. He sought out her eyes gratefully. It seemed at first that she was avoiding him, but when their eyes did meet, her expression was not what he had expected, or hoped for. There was the cast of something unmistakably unpleasant there, something indistinguishable from contempt. She looked away from him quickly. Her gaze had now acquired a constantly drifting restlessness that took Virginsky more concretely back into his memory. For now he was certain that they had met before, and he remembered under what circumstances too. Now that he was able to place her, he realised that his intuition had been correct: she was very much changed.

‘I would also say,’ she continued, addressing the room at large, ‘that the way to ensure the loyalty of those we recruit to our cause is not through terror but through education. When people understand what we are fighting for, when they share not only our convictions but also the fervour with which we hold them, we need not fear that they will betray us.’

Virginsky could hardly believe this was the flippant, cynically knowing girl he had met once before, the spoilt daughter of a lecherous father, the girl with the broken laugh, whose dangerous appetite for experience had brought her close to ruin. There was no note of cynicism in her voice at all now, and in her eyes no hungry glimmer, no desperate seeking after men’s attention. ‘Let us say,’ she went on, speaking with a calm, unforced confidence, knowing that she could hold the room through her words alone, ‘that there is here amongst us one who has come with the intention of spying on us. If, after an evening in our company, he has not converted wholeheartedly to our cause and volunteered to spy on his former masters on our behalf – well, then, we are sorry revolutionists. You might even say we would deserve to be informed against! For every word we utter is a revolutionary act. Therefore, we must make our every word count and carry the fight with us wherever we go. Comrades, to kill one who has come amongst us is a sign of our failure, as much as his disloyalty. It must only ever be done as a last resort.’

‘But you do not deny that force may be used when necessary?’ It was Botkin who asked the question.

‘There! You see!’ cried the young woman exultantly. Only now did Virginsky detect a sign of the nervous excitement that had once dominated her behaviour. She laughed, and it was the same broken laugh he remembered. ‘How he seeks to entrap me! How like a spy!’

‘Not at all. I was merely seeking to . . .’ Botkin shook his head angrily. ‘Oh, never mind. You know that I have the greatest respect for you, Tatyana Ruslanovna. Your experience during the Commune counts for a lot. No one doubts that you are a tireless worker for social revolution. However . . . you do not know men like I do. Sometimes, a measure of healthy fear can accomplish a lot.’

‘I understand that.’

‘Tatyana Ruslanovna.’ Virginsky murmured her name wonderingly.

The young woman, serious again, gave a minute, almost imperceptible shake of the head, as if she were denying any connection with the person he might have associated with that name. Or possibly the gesture was a warning. Either way, it seemed that she remembered him.

‘Enough of this,’ said Kirill Kirillovich. ‘We have kept our people waiting long enough.’

The meeting began chaotically. Kirill Kirillovich attempted to take the floor, on the grounds that it was his name day. However, he was shouted down, on the grounds that that was simply a pretext and had nothing to do with anything. Reluctantly, he gave way, although the look of sour disappointment remained on his face for the rest of the evening.

A grey-faced professorial type, older than most others there, stood up with a thick ream of papers in one hand. The groan of dismay was palpable rather than audible, an evident respect for his learning and revolutionary credentials acting as a restraint. He began to read from the papers. After a rather incoherent introduction, his thesis developed into a critique of Fourierism, tremendously pedantic and hard to follow. What made it worse was that his reading voice was a dreary monotone, pitched in an extraordinarily high register, making it uncomfortable to listen to.

He had not got far into his argument when Dolgoruky, who was perched on the arm of a sofa, interrupted: ‘How much more of this is there?’ His face wore an expression of disgust, and his tone was deliberately insolent.

The professor angled his head so that he was addressing Dolgoruky without looking at him. ‘It is a complex subject. I have looked into every aspect of it.’

‘How many pages do you have there, man?’

‘One hundred.’ The professor thumbed his pages and added, ‘And seventeen.’

‘You cannot seriously be proposing to read out all one hundred and seventeen pages!’

‘If there proves to be insufficient time to read it all this evening, I will present the remainder at our next meeting.’

‘But we will be here for all eternity. Trapped in this room, listening to you drone on and on about God knows what. And meanwhile the revolution will have taken place without us! This is what is wrong with you people! Don’t you see? What we need is action. Acts! Not words. Especially not these words.’

Dolgoruky’s outburst was greeted with stunned silence. Eventually, the professor gathered his wits enough to say, ‘But there must be some theoretical basis for action.’

‘Of course! And everyone here understands the theoretical basis well enough. The tsarist regime is corrupt, inefficient and unjust. It must be got rid of. So, let us get rid of it!’

‘But there is the question of how that is to be achieved. Ways and means.’

‘I am very happy to join in that discussion.’

‘And then there is the question of with what you will replace it.’

‘I thought that was settled. Don’t all you people want democracy?’

‘Ah, but it is not so simple as that,’ objected the professor, allowing himself a small smile of intellectual superiority. ‘How does one ensure social justice after the initial revolutionary goals have been achieved?’

Dolgoruky waved his hand airily. ‘We will cross that bridge when we come to it.’

‘I agree with Dolgoruky,’ said Botkin. ‘To the extent that I think we should concentrate our discussions on practical matters. However, I also agree that it is important that our people have a firm grasp of the theoretical and intellectual bases of our movement.’ He turned to the professorial type. ‘I propose that you write a précis of your paper, which may be circulated amongst our people, for them to read at a more convenient time.’

‘But it is impossible to précis my arguments. They must be heard in full, otherwise the nuances will be missed.’

‘We do not have time for nuances.’

‘Botkin’s proposal is a good one,’ declared Tatyana Ruslanovna. Her tone was conciliatory as she addressed the professor. ‘We are grateful to you for the work you have put into this. And anxious that the fruits of your labour should not be wasted. Do you not see that a précis is the best way to ensure the propagation of your important ideas among the widest number of people?’

‘But so much will be lost,’ he complained forlornly. ‘A précis will be meaningless.’

‘You must try,’ insisted Tatyana Ruslanovna. ‘And now, let me, if I may, summarise what I believe to be the theoretical basis upon which any revolutionary act is based. As many of you know, a few years ago I lived for a while in Zurich, where I was sent by my family following certain unfortunate incidents in my private life.’ She could not resist flashing an almost desperate look in Virginsky’s direction. Rightly or wrongly, he had the impression that she was addressing her remarks solely to him. ‘The man I loved was murdered. My father was even suspected of murdering him – in defence of my
maidenly honour
of course.’ The harsh irony that had once, at the time of the events she was referring to, characterised almost all her utterances broke through her otherwise measured discourse. ‘But in time I realised that I did not love that man after all. What I was in love with was the idea of escape, escape from my family, and in particular my father. I had looked upon the man I thought I loved as the means to achieve this escape. Indeed, that was why I persuaded myself that I loved him. But I might just as easily have fallen in love with a locomotive engine, or a horse. I was surprised when my family consented to my journey to Switzerland, granting me the escape that I had longed for. In truth, I think they saw me as a problem to be got out of the way. I was to enrol at the university there, which as you will all know not only allows female students to attend lectures but even allows them to take their degrees.’