The Man From St. Petersburg Read online

  "I'll make a bargain with you," Papa said. "I will give her money to get decent lodgings, and I'll see that she gets a job in a factory."

  "What would be my part of the bargain?"

  "You must promise not to try to make contact with her, ever."

  Charlotte felt very tired. Papa had all the answers. She could no longer argue with him, and she did not have the power to insist. She sighed.

  "All right," she said.

  "Good girl. Now, then, I suggest you go and find her and tell her the arrangement, then say good-bye."

  "I'm not sure I can look her in the eye."

  Papa patted her hand. "She will be very grateful, you'll see. When you've spoken to her, you go to bed. I'll see to all the details."

  Charlotte did not know whether she had won or lost, whether Papa was being cruel or kind, whether Annie should feel saved or spurned. "Very well," she said wearily. She wanted to tell Papa that she loved him, but the words would not come. After a moment she got up and left the room.

  On the day after the fiasco, Feliks was awakened at noon by Bridget. He felt very weak. Bridget stood beside his bed with a large cup in her hand. Feliks sat up and took the cup. The drink was wonderful. It seemed to consist of hot milk, sugar, melted butter and lumps of bread. While he drank it Bridget moved around his room, tidying up, singing a sentimental song about boys who gave their lives for Ireland.

  She went away and came back again with another Irishwoman of her own age who was a nurse. The woman stitched his hand and put a dressing on the puncture wound in his shoulder. Feliks gathered from the conversation that she was the local abortionist. Bridget told her that Feliks had been in a fight in a pub. The nurse charged a shilling for the visit and said: "You won't die. If you'd had yourself seen to straightaway you wouldn't have bled so much. As it is you'll feel weak for days."

  When she had gone, Bridget talked to him. She was a heavy, good-natured woman in her late fifties. Her husband had got into some kind of trouble in Ireland and they had fled to the anonymity of London, where he died of the booze, she said. She had two sons who were policemen in New York and a daughter who was in service in Belfast. There was a vein of bitterness in her which showed in an occasional sarcastically humorous remark, usually at the expense of the English.

  While she was explaining why Ireland should have Home Rule, Feliks went to sleep. She woke him again in the evening to give him hot soup.

  On the following day his physical wounds began visibly to heal, and he started to feel the pain of his emotional wounds. All the despair and self-reproach which he had felt in the park as he ran away now came back to him. Running away! How could it happen?

  Lydia.

  She was now Lady Walden.

  He felt nauseated.

  He made himself think clearly and coolly. He had known that she married and went to England. Obviously the Englishman she married was likely to be both an aristocrat and a man with a strong interest in Russia. Equally obviously, the person who negotiated with Orlov had to be a member of the Establishment and an expert on Russian affairs. I couldn't have guessed it would turn out to be the same man, Feliks thought, but I should have realized the possibility.

  The coincidence was not as remarkable as it had seemed, but it was no less shattering. Twice in his life Feliks had been utterly, blindly, deliriously happy. The first time was when, at the age of four--before his mother died--he had been given a red ball. The second was when Lydia fell in love with him. But the red ball had never been taken from him.

  He could not imagine a greater happiness than that which he had had with Lydia--nor a disappointment more appalling than the one that followed. There had certainly been no such highs and lows in Feliks's emotional life since then. After she left he began to tramp the Russian countryside, dressed as a monk, preaching the anarchist gospel. He told the peasants that the land was theirs because they tilled it; that the wood in the forest belonged to anyone who felled a tree; that nobody had a right to govern them except themselves, and because self-government was no government it was called anarchy. He was a wonderful preacher and he made many friends, but he never fell in love again, and he hoped he never would.

  His preaching phase had ended in 1899, during the national student strike, when he was arrested as an agitator and sent to Siberia. The years of wandering had already inured him to cold, hunger and pain; but now, working in a chain gang, using wooden tools to dig out gold in a mine, laboring on when the man chained to his side had fallen dead, seeing boys and women flogged, he came to know darkness, bitterness, despair and finally hatred. In Siberia he had learned the facts of life: steal or starve, hide or be beaten, fight or die. There he had acquired cunning and ruthlessness. There he had learned the ultimate truth about oppression: that it works by turning its victims against each other instead of against their oppressors.

  He escaped, and began the long journey into madness, which ended when he killed the policeman outside Omsk and realized that he had no fear.

  He returned to civilization as a full-blooded revolutionist. It seemed incredible to him that he had once scrupled to throw bombs at the noblemen who maintained those Siberian convict mines. He was enraged by the government-inspired pogroms against the Jews in the west and south of Russia. He was sickened by the wrangling between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at the second congress of the Social Democratic Party. He was inspired by the magazine that came from Geneva, called Bread and Liberty, with the quote from Bakunin on its masthead: "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge." Finally, hating the government, disenchanted with the socialists and convinced by the anarchists, he went to a mill town called Bialystock and founded a group called Struggle.

  Those had been the glory years. He would never forget young Nisan Farber, who had knifed the millowner outside the synagogue on the Day of Atonement. Feliks himself had shot the chief of police. Then he took the fight to St. Petersburg, where he founded another anarchist group, The Unauthorized, and planned the successful assassination of the Grand Duke Sergey. That year--1905--in St. Petersburg there were killings, bank robberies, strikes and riots: the revolution seemed only days away. Then came the repression--more fierce, more efficient and a great deal more bloodthirsty than anything the revolutionists had ever done. The secret police came in the middle of the night to the homes of The Unauthorized, and they were all arrested except Feliks, who killed one policeman and maimed another and escaped to Switzerland, for by then nobody could stop him, he was so determined and powerful and angry and ruthless.

  In all those years, and even in the quiet years in Switzerland that followed, he had never loved anyone. There had been people of whom he had grown mildly fond--a pig-keeper in Georgia, an old Jewish bomb-maker in Bialystock, Ulrich in Geneva--but they tended to pass into and then out of his life. There had been women, too. Many women sensed his violent nature and shied away from him, but those of them who found him attractive found him extremely so. Occasionally he had yielded to the temptation, and he had always been more or less disappointed. His parents were both dead and he had not seen his sister for twenty years. Looking back, he could see his life since Lydia as a slow slide into anesthesia. He had survived by becoming less and less sensitive, through the experiences of imprisonment, torture, the chain gang and the long, brutal escape from Siberia. He no longer cared even for himself: this, he had decided, was the meaning of his lack of fear, for one could only be afraid on account of something for which one cared.

  He liked it this way.

  His love was not for people, it was for the people. His compassion was for starving peasants in general, and sick children and frightened soldiers and crippled miners in general. He hated nobody in particular: just all princes, all landlords, all capitalists and all generals.

  In giving his personality over to a higher cause he knew he was like a priest, and indeed like one priest in particular: his father. He no longer felt diminished by this comparison. He respected his father's high-mindedness and despised the cau
se it served. He, Feliks, had chosen the right cause. His life would not be wasted.

  This was the Feliks that had formed over the years, as his mature personality emerged from the fluidity of youth. What had been so devastating about Lydia's scream, he thought, was that it had reminded him that there might have been a different Feliks, a warm and loving man, a sexual man, a man capable of jealousy, greed, vanity and fear. Would I rather be that man? he asked himself. That man would long to stare into her wide gray eyes and stroke her fine blond hair, to see her collapse into helpless giggles as she tried to learn how to whistle, to argue with her about Tolstoy, to eat black bread and smoked herrings with her and to watch her screw up her pretty face at her first taste of vodka. That man would be playful.

  He would also be concerned. He would wonder whether Lydia was happy. He would hesitate to pull the trigger for fear she might be hit by a ricochet. He might be reluctant to kill her nephew in case she were fond of the boy. That man would make a poor revolutionist.

  No, he thought as he went to sleep that night; I would not want to be that man. He is not even dangerous.

  In the night he dreamed that he shot Lydia, but when he woke up he could not remember whether it had made him sad.

  On the third day he went out. Bridget gave him a shirt and a coat which had belonged to her husband. They fitted badly, for he had been shorter and wider than Feliks. Feliks's own trousers and boots were still wearable, and Bridget had washed the blood off.

  He mended the bicycle, which had been damaged when he dropped it down the steps. He straightened a buckled wheel, patched a punctured tire, and taped the split leather of the saddle. He climbed on and rode a short distance, but he realized immediately that he was not yet strong enough to go far on it. He walked instead.

  It was a glorious sunny day. At a secondhand clothes stall in Mornington Crescent he gave a halfpenny and Bridget's husband's coat for a lighter coat that fitted him. He felt peculiarly happy, walking through the streets of London in the summer weather. I've nothing to be happy about, he thought; my clever, well-organized, daring assassination plan fell to pieces because a woman cried out and a middle-aged man drew a sword. What a fiasco!

  It was Bridget who had cheered him up, he decided. She had seen that he was in trouble and she had given help without thinking twice. It reminded him of the great-heartedness of the people in whose cause he fired guns and threw bombs and got himself sliced up with a sword. It gave him strength.

  He made his way to St. James's Park and took up his familiar station opposite the Walden house. He looked across at the pristine white stonework and the high, elegant windows. You can knock me down, he thought, but you can't knock me out; if you knew I was back here again, you'd tremble in your patent-leather shoes.

  He settled down to watch. The trouble with a fiasco was that it put the intended victim on his guard. It would now be very difficult indeed to kill Orlov because he would be taking precautions. But Feliks would find out what those precautions were, and he would evade them.

  At eleven a.m. the carriage went out, and Feliks thought he saw behind the glass a spade-shaped beard and a top hat: Walden. It came back at one. It went out again at three, this time with a feminine hat inside, belonging presumably to Lydia, or perhaps to the daughter of the family; whoever it was returned at five. In the evening several guests came and the family apparently dined at home. There was no sign of Orlov. It rather looked as if he had moved out.

  I'll find him, then, he thought.

  On his way back to Camden Town he bought a newspaper. When he arrived home Bridget offered him tea, so he read the paper in her parlor. There was nothing about Orlov either in the Court Circular or the Social Notes.

  Bridget saw what he was reading. "Interesting material, for a fellow such as yourself," she said sarcastically. "You'll be making up your mind which of the balls to attend tonight, no doubt."

  Feliks smiled and said nothing.

  Bridget said: "I know what you are, you know. You're an anarchist."

  Feliks was very still.

  "Who are you going to kill?" she said. "I hope it's the bloody King." She drank tea noisily. "Well, don't stare at me like that. You look as if you're about to slit me throat. You needn't worry. I won't tell on you. My husband did for a few of the English in his time."

  Feliks was nonplussed. She had guessed--and she approved! He did not know what to say. He stood up and folded his newspaper. "You're a good woman," he said.

  "If I was twenty years younger I'd kiss you. Get away before I forget myself."

  "Thank you for the tea," Feliks said. He went out.

  He spent the rest of the evening sitting in the drab basement room, staring at the wall, thinking. Of course Orlov was lying low, but where? If he was not at the Walden house, he might be at the Russian Embassy, or at the home of one of the embassy staff, or at a hotel, or at the home of one of Walden's friends. He might even be out of London, at a house in the country. There was no way to check all the possibilities.

  It was not going to be so easy. He began to worry.

  He considered following Walden around. It might be the best he could do, but it was unsatisfactory. Although it was possible for a bicycle to keep pace with a carriage in London, it could be exhausting for the cyclist, and Feliks knew that he could not contemplate it for several days. Suppose then that, over a period of three days, Walden visited several private houses, two or three offices, a hotel or two and an embassy--how would Feliks find out which of those buildings Orlov was in? It was possible, but it would take time.

  Meanwhile the negotiations would be progressing and war drawing nearer.

  And suppose that, after all that, Orlov was still living in Walden's house and had decided simply not to go out?

  Feliks went to sleep gnawing at the problem and woke up in the morning with the solution.

  He would ask Lydia.

  He polished his boots, washed his hair and shaved. He borrowed from Bridget a white cotton scarf which, worn around his throat, concealed the fact that he had neither collar nor tie. At the secondhand clothes stall in Mornington Crescent he found a bowler hat which fitted him. He looked at himself in the stallholder's cracked, frosted mirror. He looked dangerously respectable. He walked on.

  He had no idea how Lydia would react to him. He was quite sure that she had not recognized him on the night of the fiasco: his face had been covered and her scream had been a reaction to the sight of an anonymous man with a gun. Assuming he could get in to see her, what would she do? Would she throw him out? Would she immediately begin to tear off her clothes, the way she had used to? Would she be merely indifferent, thinking of him as someone she knew in her youth and no longer cared for?

  He wanted her to be shocked and dazed and still in love with him, so that he would be able to make her tell him a secret.

  Suddenly he could not remember what she looked like. It was very odd. He knew she was a certain height, neither fat nor thin, with pale hair and gray eyes; but he could not bring to mind a picture of her. If he concentrated on her nose he could see that, or he could visualize her vaguely, without definite form, in the bleak light of a St. Petersburg evening; but when he tried to focus on her she faded away.

  He arrived at the park and hesitated outside the house. It was ten o'clock. Would they have got up yet? In any event, he thought he should probably wait until Walden left the house. It occurred to him that he might even see Orlov in the hall--at a time when he had no weapon.

  If I do, I'll strangle him with my hands, he thought savagely.

  He wondered what Lydia was doing right now. She might be dressing. Ah, yes, he thought, I can picture her in a corset, brushing her hair before a mirror. Or she might be eating breakfast. There would be eggs and meat and fish, but she would eat a small piece of a soft roll and a slice of apple.

  The carriage appeared at the entrance. A minute or two later someone got in and it drove to the gate. Feliks stood on the opposite side of the road as it emerged.
Suddenly he was looking straight at Walden, behind the window of the coach, and Walden was looking at him. Feliks had an urge to shout: "Hey, Walden, I fucked her first!" Instead he grinned and doffed his hat. Walden inclined his head in acknowledgment, and the carriage passed on.

  Feliks wondered why he felt so elated.

  He walked through the gateway and across the courtyard. He saw that there were flowers in every window of the house, and he thought: Ah, yes, she always loved flowers. He climbed the steps to the porch and pulled the bell at the front door.

  Perhaps she will call the police, he thought.

  A moment later a servant opened the door. Feliks stepped inside. "Good morning," he said.

  "Good morning, sir," the servant said.

  So I do look respectable. "I should like to see the Countess of Walden. It is a matter of great urgency. My name is Konstantin Dmitrich Levin. I am sure she will remember me from St. Petersburg."

  "Yes, sir. Konstantin . . . ?"

  "Konstantin Dmitrich Levin. Let me give you my card." Feliks fumbled inside his coat. "Ach! I brought none."

  "That's all right, sir. Konstantin Dmitrich Levin."

  "Yes."

  "If you will be so good as to wait here, I'll see if the Countess is in."

  Feliks nodded, and the servant went away.

  SIX

  The Queen Anne bureau-bookcase was one of Lydia's favorite pieces of furniture in the London house. Two hundred years old, it was of black lacquer decorated in gold with vaguely Chinese scenes of pagodas, willow trees, islands and flowers. The flap front folded down to form a writing table and to reveal red-velvet-lined pigeonholes for letters and tiny drawers for paper and pens. There were large drawers in the bombe base, and the top, above her eye level as she sat at the table, was a bookcase with a mirrored door. The ancient mirror showed a cloudy, distorted reflection of the morning room behind her.

  On the writing table was an unfinished letter to her sister, Aleks's mother, in St. Petersburg. Lydia's handwriting was small and untidy. She had written, in Russian: I don't know what to think about Charlotte and then she had stopped. She sat, looking into the cloudy mirror, musing.