Twelve (3 page)

'Pretty good,' I replied. Vadim frowned. 'But I'm damned good with a sword.'

Vadim grinned. 'Good. Ideally, you won't need to spend too much time using either. One last thing – for now: can you recommend anyone else for this? We can work as a team of three, but four or five would be better.'

'Another thinker, you mean?' I asked.

Vadim nodded. I thought for a moment, then turned to Dmitry. 'Have you mentioned Maksim Sergeivich?'

'I thought about him,' said Dmitry. 'He's very young and he's a bit . . . odd.'

'He certainly thinks,' I said.

'That's just it,' replied Dmitry. 'He thinks odd things.'

'Sounds ideal,' announced Vadim.

And so the following day Vadim had been introduced to Maks. He had required even less persuasion than I had, but then it would have been hard to find a role that was more appropriate for him. We had all met for the first time within the space of just a few months, but already our band was complete.

But now, seven years later, Dmitry had invited new members to join us – men that only he knew and only he could vouch for. Desperate diseases call for desperate remedies, but as I fell asleep I couldn't help but feel uncomfortable about these Oprichniki that Dmitry was to introduce into our midst.

Despite our late night, I woke early the following morning. We had a week until Dmitry's 'people' – the Oprichniki – arrived and, with only a little preparation to be made for them, that meant almost seven days of leisure.

I walked around the still-familiar streets for the first time in nearly six months and noticed little had changed except the weather, and on this glorious summer's day that was a change for the better. The people were much as they had been. Certainly they knew that Bonaparte was approaching, but they knew too that he must stop. No emperor whose throne was as far away as Paris could ever march his army all the way to Moscow. The fact that he had marched as far as Vilna, as Vitebsk, as Smolensk, the fact that those cities were also unassailable from Paris, they fully understood. But that didn't change their belief that Moscow itself could not be reached. And I was in full agreement. Of everything I was to see in that long autumn of 1812, despite the almost unimaginable horrors, the most unreal was to be the sight of French troops on the streets of Moscow.

Was it just that it wasn't my home town that made me love Moscow? I'd lived in and around Petersburg my whole life. It was beautiful and comfortable and familiar. Familiarity didn't breed contempt, simply predictability. A knowledge of every inch led to few surprises. It was odd then that Petersburg was by far the younger of the two cities. It had been only a century before – precisely a century, in 1712 – that Petersburg had replaced Moscow as the capital city, less than a decade after its foundation.

A city built as quickly as Petersburg, and built to the plans of so forceful a character as Tsar Pyetr, appeared to me to be precisely what it was – synthetic. Moscow was created over centuries by people who built what they needed to live. Petersburg was built to emulate the great cities of Europe, and so it would always seem counterfeit – only slightly more real than the cardboard frontages of the villages erected by Potemkin to give Tsarina Yekaterina a more picturesque view as she toured the backwaters of her empire. But Petersburg was the capital, and society adored it. Society had moved to Petersburg, but life remained in Moscow.

My wife, Marfa Mihailovna, loved Petersburg in a way I never could. She was just as familiar with it and used that intimacy as the basis for seeing a depth that I could never perceive. Our young son seemed to love it too, but at five years old, nothing was yet familiar to him; everything was a new adventure. So Marfa stayed in Petersburg and, however far I travelled, returning to one meant returning to the other. Returning to either or to both felt the same – comfortable.

As I meandered through the Moscow streets, I drank in each of the great sights of the city. I walked along the embankment of the river Moskva, looking up at the towers that punctuated the walls of the Kremlin. I turned north, passing beneath the lofty onion domes of Saint Vasily's and then across Red Square, thronged with Muscovites going about their lives. Then I continued northwards, back into the maze of tiny streets in Tverskaya.

But perhaps I was fooling myself. Perhaps I was wandering around the streets of Moscow, marvelling at its people and its buildings, in order only to tease myself before I headed for my true destination, like a man who eats all his vegetables first, praising their subtle flavour while really trying to leave his plate empty of everything but the steak that is the only part of the meal he ever wanted. Or was I like a drunk who wakes early and realizes that there are times when it is too early in the day even for him and so kills time, trying to keep his mind off that first sharp, sweet drink?

It was almost midday when I reached the corner of Degtyarny Lane and sat down again on the bench where I'd first sat the previous December.

Back in the winter of 1811, I'd been there with Dmitry and Maks. Vadim had been home in Petersburg for his daughter's wedding. I'd been at the wedding too, but had returned to Moscow almost straight after, countering my guilt at the look on Marfa's face with the strange anticipation that something would happen, had to happen, once I got back to a city as vibrant as the old capital.

But little had seemed to be going on and so the three of us had, before long and for whatever reason, found ourselves sat on that bench in the quiet, snow-covered square exchanging jokes and watching the men (and occasional women) entering and leaving the building opposite.

There had been a moment of silence as our eyes were all taken by a particularly fine-looking young lady who was leaving the building, a silence which Maks filled with an announcement made in the voice he usually reserved for describing the political affairs of nations.

'It's a brothel!'

'Of course it's a brothel,' laughed Dmitry. To be honest, I hadn't noticed, but thinking about it, it seemed pretty obvious. Dmitry may have been bluffing too, but it always seemed best to appear worldly-wise in front of a young soldier like Maksim, so I laughed along with Dmitry.

'You want to go in?' Dmitry asked Maks. 'It looks like it's something of a military establishment.' And indeed most of the clientele did seem to be cavalry officers, just like ourselves.

'No thanks,' Maks had replied, in a voice that made me wonder whether he had any human desires at all.

Dmitry turned to me. 'Aleksei? Ah no. You've got the loving wife and family.'

'How about you?' I asked Dmitry.

'Me? No. I don't like to play the field either.' He winked at no one in particular. 'There's a little place I use on the other side of Nikitskiy Street. Cheap and clean. I'll stick with that.'

The girl who had caught our attention earlier soon returned, clutching tight to her body the basket of fruit and other foods she had gone out to buy. She was astonishing. Her large eyes sloped slightly upwards away from her nose and her rich lips were pressed tightly shut against the wind-blown snow through which she struggled.

I felt I had seen her before. Suddenly, it dawned on me.

'She looks like Marie-Louise.'

'Who?' snorted Dmitry.

'The new empress of France,' explained Maks.

'The new Madame Bonaparte,' was my description.

'Ah! The old Austrian whore,' was Dmitry's.

All of our comments were to a reasonable degree true. In 1810, Bonaparte had divorced his first wife, Josephine, and wed Marie-Louise, the daughter of the Austrian emperor, Francis the Second. Josephine had been unable to provide Bonaparte with children and the emperor needed an heir. How quickly the French had forgotten what they did to their last Austrian queen.

'She looks a bit like her, but not much,' said Maks.

'Who knows?' I replied. 'I've only ever seen one picture, but they
are
similar.'

The picture I had seen enchanted me. It was just a print based on a portrait of her, but she seemed to me truly beautiful – much better than Josephine. But then, they said Bonaparte loved Josephine. That's why they had stayed together even without children.

'Better have him bed some Austrian harlot than touch the tsar's sister,' said Dmitry. 'She was too young. Very wise of Tsar Aleksandr to tell Napoleon to wait until she was eighteen.'

Dmitry raised his arm. I looked up and noticed that he had made a snowball, which he was preparing to throw at the girl as she trudged her way back to the door of the brothel. However minor it was, it seemed so needlessly cruel that I shoved at his arm with my own as he threw. He was an excellent shot and, even with my hindrance, the snowball hit the wall just inches in front of her face.

She glanced towards us and, because my arm was raised, assumed that I had been the thrower. The look she gave had such a combination of anger and pride, of asking why I presumed to treat her in such a way, that I felt almost compelled to go and apologize, not just to tell her that it hadn't been me, but to explain why I hadn't tried harder to prevent it, to be forgiven for even knowing the man who had thrown the snowball.

Dmitry chuckled to himself. 'Did you hear what she said to him on their wedding night?'

'Who?' I asked.

'Marie-Louise. To Bonaparte,' replied Dmitry, revealing a greater knowledge of French royal marriages than he had previously shown. 'After he'd screwed her for the first time, she liked it so much she said, "Do it again."'

I joined in Dmitry's raucous laughter, even though I'd heard the story before. Maksim didn't laugh. At the time, I'd presumed that he simply didn't get it.

'You know what
she'd
say?' continued Dmitry through his laughter, indicating the young 'lady' whose resemblance to Marie-Louise had started the whole conversation. 'She'd say "Do it again – second time is half price."'

This time both Dmitry and Maks laughed, but I didn't. It's one thing to insult a French empress, another to insult a Russian whore.

As it turned out, she charged by the hour.

T
WO HOURS LATER I HAD BEEN LYING ON HER BED, WATCHING
her from behind as she sat at the dressing table, brushing her long dark hair. Her name was Dominique.

'So, why did you throw the snowball at me?'

'I didn't,' I replied with a self-assurance that I couldn't have expressed to her before. 'My friend did. I was trying to stop him. I wanted to apologize.'

'That was an odd way to apologize. You seemed to enjoy it. You must love confession.'

I went over to her and kissed her shoulder. 'It's good for the soul.'

She pushed me away with a polite, professional firmness. 'And why did you care if I got hit by a snowball?'

'I don't like winter.' It was a simple answer, but the truth went much deeper, back to the cracked ice of Lake Satschan and the winter of 1805.

'Can't be much fun living in Moscow then.'

'I don't live here; I'm from Petersburg. I'm just stationed here.'

'Soldier, eh? Where's your uniform?' she asked, not bothering to point out that Petersburg is even colder than Moscow.

I countered her question with another. 'Are you French?'

She laughed. 'Do I sound it?'

'Dominique is a very French name.'

'It's really Domnikiia. When I started out, everything French was so fashionable.' It could not have been many years since she 'started out'. She smiled thoughtfully. 'Less so now. And what's your name?' She saw my surprise. 'You don't have to tell.' But her look of childlike disappointment meant I did have to.

'Aleksei Ivanovich.'

'Lyosha.'

'Some people call me that.' No one called me that any more. It was a common enough nickname for an Aleksei, but it had never seemed to suit me since I'd joined the army.

I paid and left. I used to pretend that I really had gone because I felt the need to apologize. I'd certainly felt guilty afterwards, but not so guilty that I hadn't visited her again during that winter, perhaps three or four times before we were posted out west once more in March. On many other days I had felt the desire to visit her, but had resisted, instead wandering along nearby streets, teasing myself with how close I could get without going in.

Now, in August of 1812, I was doing the same thing again. All through the retreat, from Poland, through Lithuania and through Russia, I'd known that going back to Moscow meant going back to Domnikiia.

And here I was. I'd wandered the streets and I'd sat on the bench and now was my chance to leave.

I went in.

The lounge was as I remembered it. The front door had only just been unbolted and I was the first customer of the day. Half a dozen girls were scattered about, trying to look provocative. Domnikiia stood with her back to me, talking to a colleague whilst once again brushing her long, dark brown hair. I slipped my arms around her waist and whispered in her ear, 'Remember me?'

She turned round. It was not Domnikiia. Whoever she was, she tried to remember me from the dozens upon dozens of faces that must have passed before hers. She saw from my expression that I'd made a mistake and became torn between her feminine instinct to slap me and her professional instinct to offer encouragement.

'No, but I'm sure I will,' she replied, the professional side winning out as she put her arms around my neck.

I pulled away from her. I tried to say something about being terribly sorry, but under the circumstances, it was quite out of place. My eyes darted around the room for help. They fell upon the real Domnikiia, who was descending the stairs.

'Aleksei Ivanovich!' She greeted me with more convincing enthusiasm than I've heard from many a hostess at many a Petersburg party. But it was, I supposed, just a skill she had acquired, much like the ability to remember my name after so many months.

She came closer and whispered in my ear, 'Lyosha. Have I grown so old since last time, that you cast me aside for Margarita Kirillovna? I like my soldiers to have experience rather than youth; but most soldiers see it the other way round.'

'I'm sorry, Margarita Kirillovna,' I said to the girl whose back looked so like Domnikiia's. 'I mistook you.' I felt Domnikiia's hand leading me away and up the stairs and I gladly went with her.

Her room was little changed of itself – the same bed and the same dressing table – but summer made all the difference. The windows were open to let in the air and the shutters were closed to keep out the sun.

'You can have Margarita if you want,' said Domnikiia. 'She's new, but very popular.'

'I'm sure any custom she gets is only because people mistake her for you,' I told her.

'You don't
have
to flatter me, you know.'

Afterwards, she seemed less rushed than on previous occasions. She peeped out the door as I began to dress.

'No hurry,' she said. 'The salon's empty. The army's out of town and the civilians are too scared to do . . . much. Why are you in town anyway, my non-uniformed officer?'

I avoided the question. 'You have a very good memory.'

'What? Because I remember your name and your nickname and that you're a soldier and that you don't wear a uniform and that you think you know I'm really Domnikiia not Dominique? I just give you what you want.' She smirked. 'You guys don't want to be fucked, you want to be noticed.'

'
Think
I know? So you're not Domnikiia?'

'I might not be,' she replied with the same confidence. Then her tone relented as she put her arms round my neck. 'But I am.' After a pause, she continued. 'Trade for Dominique is picking up though.'

'How do you mean?'

'When I started out, everyone wanted anything that was French, so everyone wanted Dominique. But over the past year nobody likes the French, so nobody wants Dominique.'

I had to smile. 'These politicians just don't think about the effect they have on commerce, do they?'

'Exactly. Next time you see the tsar, you tell him. But nowadays everyone wants to screw the French, so everyone wants to screw Dominique.'

I laughed. 'And who did I just screw? Dominique or Domnikiia?'

She giggled. 'I still reckon you wanted it to be Margarita.'

She paused. 'I don't know. What about you? Was it Aleksei or Lyosha?' I gave no answer and she changed the subject. 'So what's the news from the front?'

I was astonished at her impudence. 'I can't tell you that.'

'Oh come on. No one would know anything if it wasn't for loose-tongued soldiers in brothels. It's tit for tat. You tell me and I'll tell you.'

'And what are you going to tell me? You said yourself there are no soldiers in town.'

'There are other people with tales to tell.'

I guessed she was bluffing, but it did no harm to reveal what she could find out elsewhere. I told her about the defeats at Vilna and Vitebsk and Smolensk, told her the official line that the French would be stopped before Moscow, not much more.

'So, what have you got to tell me?' I asked.

'Oh, nothing.'

'Tell me!' I said, rolling her on to her back.

'You going to interrogate me?'

Looking down at the tantalizing smile on her lips, it was a tempting suggestion, but the very idea brought back memories I fought to suppress. I tickled her. She giggled uncontrollably. Evidently she was very ticklish, but then, of course, that's what I would like her to be. She was, in her own way, a Potemkin village – a façade behind which I might only find disappointment if I ventured to look.

'All right! All right, Lyosha,' she exclaimed through her laughter, 'I'll tell you.' She took a moment to get her breath back. 'The only interesting things I've heard are from Tula.'

'So what's going on in Tula? Something at the munitions works?' I asked. Tula was of immeasurable importance to the war. Without that city, our supplies of ordnance and ammunition would quickly dry to almost nothing.

'Not
in
Tula,' replied Domnikiia. '
From
Tula. There's stories of some sort of plague. Thirty dead in Rostov. Fifteen in Pavlovsk.'

Plagues were always exaggerated. When I was young, my grandmother used to tell me old folk stories about plagues, and I'd quickly chosen to be as sceptical of them as I was of the other, less earthly tales that she told. But as I'd grown older, I'd come to put more faith in my grandmother's word, on this issue at least. The last big plague to hit Moscow had been in 1771, not long before I'd been born, and a vivid memory for my grandparents and my parents, even from the safe vantage point of Petersburg. In total, a third of the people of the Moscow oblast had died. As far as I could tell, that figure was no exaggeration, though others that I had heard were. When I witnessed the plague for myself, whilst fighting south of the Danube, the mixture of rumour and fact was much the same. This new story of plague would have more than a seed of truth in it. Both towns mentioned by Domnikiia were on the river Don, one of the great arteries that run between central Russia and the Black Sea, and it wasn't unusual for disease to be carried up the river by boat. The numbers seemed unusually concentrated – but that was probably part of the process of news becoming rumour.

'I hope it doesn't come to Moscow. The plague, I mean,' said Domnikiia.

'Maybe it will reach us at about the same time as the French do. Save us the trouble of killing them.'

'Is that going to happen?' She huddled closer to me, her voice calling for a reassuring answer.

'No, Domnikiia,' I lied. 'Neither Bonaparte nor the plague will ever get as far as Moscow.' But I'd seen for myself how fast both the French and the plague could travel. And what eventually did arrive proved to be more terrible than either.

When I returned to my room, there was a parcel waiting for me. It was from my wife. Most of the news in the accompanying letter was long out of date, but with it in the parcel was a small oval icon of Christ, on a silver chain. In her letter, Marfa explained she had heard stories that Bonaparte was the antichrist, and she asked me to wear the icon to protect myself. I felt a shiver of guilt. So far I had needed no protection from French bullets, but I had not found myself protected from temptation. I kissed the image out of habit and then put the chain round my neck, perhaps with the hope of it leading me away from any further encounters with Domnikiia, perhaps with the intent of assuaging my guilt afterwards.

Most of the letter contained nothing of especial interest, just general news from Petersburg. Vadim's daughter, Yelena, was still healthily pregnant. Everyone we knew was well, but all were worried about the war and wanted my opinion on what would happen.

The part of the letter that I read again and again was about our son, Dmitry. It was nothing special, just a mother's detailed description of how he was behaving. He would be six in a few months' time and I'd probably spent less than a third of his life in his company. It was the same for so many children of soldiers. I was pleased to read that he was often asking when I would return; pleased that he even remembered I existed.

We'd named him Dmitry after Dmitry Fetyukovich. Seven years ago, Dmitry Fetyukovich had not been the tough cynic I knew today. Fighting the Turks had changed him somehow, but I had never learned precisely what had happened to him. He never learned precisely what happened to me either; no one did, not even Marfa.

I'd first met Dmitry in the June of 1805. He was passionate, radical and optimistic, as so many young, educated Russians were at the time, having heard of the freedoms that men enjoyed in the west. Despite the tsar's vocal support for the new coalition against Bonaparte, our troops were slow to move into action. Dmitry and I had both volunteered for reconnaissance work, and we spent many hours together watching and assessing enemy movements, but still our forces did not engage the French head on. England – thanks to Nelson – fought better at sea than on land and so, throughout that autumn, Austria was left alone to face the French advance, with little success. The farcical capture of tens of thousands of Austrian troops at Ulm was the pinnacle of their ineptitude. We Russians were to first see action that winter at Austerlitz; a battle of over 150,000 men.

But Austerlitz itself was not to be
our
first battle. The night before, Vadim called us together. It was our most dangerous mission to date. Vadim led us deep behind French lines, so that we could get last-minute reconnaissance of their positions. We were spotted and attacked – perhaps fifteen French against only us four.

It should have been a thrashing, but we were all strong fighters with the sword. The four of us had stood side by side, slashing and thrusting at our French attackers, who had become so pampered by the superiority of their rifles that they had forgotten how a sabre should be used. I had already despatched two when a blow from the butt of a third sword had knocked me to the ground. I saw a French sabre raised above me, poised to give a final, fatal strike when Dmitry threw himself in the way. The blade bounced off his raised arm and sliced open his right cheek. I felt his blood splatter on my face, but the wound did not hamper him. He slashed the French soldier across his belly and then struck a mortal blow to his neck. By then, I was back on my feet.

I know that at other times in other battles I have had my life saved by my comrades, and I'm sure that I have saved theirs; in the heat of battle, one does not have time to stop and notice. But on this occasion I did, and Dmitry's brave action forever held a special importance for me.

Faced with me, Vadim and Dmitry – still ferocious despite his wounds – the surviving French soon retreated. It was only then that we realized they had taken Maksim with them as their prisoner. We hoped he was a prisoner; there was certainly no body that we could see. Maksim's capture lay heavily on Vadim's conscience in particular. He had only been eighteen at the time and Vadim felt responsible for taking an inexperienced boy on such a mission, but we had little time to indulge in the luxury of regret.

The following day had come the Battle of Austerlitz itself – a humiliation for Austria and Russia, but perhaps Bonaparte's greatest triumph. The three of us – Dmitry, Vadim and I – were under the command, ultimately, of General Booksgevden. We were part of the force which was to take the village of Telnitz and from there, turn right to encircle Bonaparte's flank. The capture of the village was straightforward enough, but it soon became clear that we risked being encircled, not encircling. All we could do was stay there and await further orders. Elsewhere on the field, the battle had been going just as badly. The light frost and snow – which we Russians, if not our Austrian allies, should have been familiar with – was giving Bonaparte further advantage. Perhaps the frost was not heavy enough and the snow not deep enough for what Russians are used to.