Thirteen Years Later (10 page)

‘Are you tired?’ he whispered.

‘Yes,’ said the little girl, with certainty.

‘Are you going to go to sleep?’

‘Yes,’ came again, in the same tone.

‘Do I get a kiss goodnight?’

Tamara nodded. He leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips. Domnikiia bent forward and did the same. Then she began to sing a lullaby.

‘
Bayoo, babshkee, bayoo,
Zheevyet myelneek na krayoo,
On nye byedyen, nye bogat,
Polna gorneetsa rebyat.
Vsye po lavochkam seedyat,
Kashoo maslyenoo yedyat.
Kasha maslenaya,
Lozhka krashenaya,
Lozhka gnyetsa,
Rot smyeyetsya,
Doosha radooyetsya.
Bayoo, babshkee, bayoo.
Bayoo, babshkee, bayoo.
’

It was a meaningless song, about a miller and his children at carnival. Aleksei had never heard Domnikiia sing until Tamara was born. She had a sweet voice. He listened and watched Tamara drop off to sleep.

‘Yelena Vadimovna and Valentin Valentinovich have been very good to me,’ said Domnikiia, picking up their earlier conversation as she stroked the sleeping child’s hair. ‘They must owe you a great deal.’

‘Owe me? It’s not really like that. You never met Vadim, did you?’

She shook her head.

‘He did everyone favours,’ Aleksei continued, ‘without asking for anything in return – though he often got it. After he died, I think, those of us who knew him best realized if we couldn’t pay him back, the closest thing to do was pay each other back.’ That explained some of it, explained Yelena’s attitude, but it had taken more to bring Valentin on side.

‘It sounds like the Freemasons,’ said Domnikiia. Aleksei nodded. Because of its involvement with the revolutionary societies, he knew something of Freemasonry, but the Society of the Friends of Vadim Fyodorovich was infinitely more exclusive. ‘So how have you paid them back?’ asked Domnikiia.

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ said Aleksei, realizing he had heard the phrase years before, but unable to remember where. ‘They don’t even have to know that I will. As long as they know that I would.’

‘Don’t they think they owe anything to Marfa Mihailovna?’ It had taken years for Domnikiia even to go beyond the deliberately distant ‘your wife’, but she still stuck with the formal combination of name and patronymic.

Aleksei laughed briefly. ‘Morally, I’m sure, but she hardly knew Vadim.’

‘So they’re not doing it for me?’

‘Absolutely not,’ said Aleksei. He leaned over the bed and kissed her. ‘But you’ll never be able to tell the difference.’

‘I wish I had met Vadim,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I’m glad I met Maks.’

You fucked Maks. The thought blurted itself out in Aleksei’s mind, but he did not give voice to it. Their brief relationship had meant nothing to either. For her, it was work; for him, nature.

‘I met Dmitry, too,’ she added ruefully. ‘Dmitry Fetyukovich, that is.’ It was strange how they could both remember in precise detail conversations they had had years before, and also how they could each be confident that the other remembered too. In 1812 she had toyed with him as to whether she would rather meet
Dmitry his friend or Dmitry his son. She had met his friend, and it had not been a pleasant experience.

‘Shall I ever meet Dmitry Alekseevich?’ she asked, just as teasingly as all those years before.

‘I don’t think it’s a good idea.’

‘Wouldn’t he like me?’

‘He’d probably like you,’ replied Aleksei, ‘but he loves his mother.’

‘Wouldn’t he love his sister?’

They both gazed down at the tiny figure of Tamara Alekseevna, asleep in the bed, the child whom, with neither intention nor regret, they had conceived together five years earlier, whom Vadim’s daughter and son-in-law had agreed to secretly raise as their own, with her true mother never far away. Aleksei bent forward and kissed her cheek, then squeezed her mother’s hand.

‘Who couldn’t love her?’ he said.

A
LEKSEI SPENT THE NIGHT IN THE HOME OF YELENA AND
Valentin Lavrov, sleeping entwined in the limbs of his lover of almost fourteen years, just a few steps away from their beloved daughter. He crept away a little before dawn, having kissed Domnikiia, who awoke, on the lips and Tamara, who did not, on the forehead.

He glanced around as he arrived back at his hotel, but Dmitry had not shown up early. He slipped inside and emerged within half an hour, shaved, changed and carrying a knapsack which contained, amongst other necessities, the wooden sword his son had given him. The two horses he had ordered stood ready for him, and he had to wait but a few moments for Dmitry to arrive.

‘So, how was your first night in Moscow?’ asked Aleksei, as they trotted south out of the city.

‘Somewhat quiet,’ said Dmitry. ‘I’m not officially expected until next week, so until then they’re just giving me a bed to sleep in. There are only two others there so far.’

‘So did you all go and see the sights last night?’

‘We had a drink,’ said Dmitry cautiously. ‘How long will it take to reach Desna?’

Aleksei could easily tell that Dmitry didn’t want to go into any detail about his first night in the army, nor would he, for many years, want to go into detail over any other night. The reason was
simple: he had no standards to judge his own behaviour by. Whilst Aleksei, like any military father, had not held back in telling his stories of both valour and defeat, his descriptions of army life outside of battles, both in those long intermissions known as peace, and in those snatched moments of darkness when the enemy must pause for sleep, had remained sanitized. There was no need to tell any son about the whoring and the drinking and the inescapable vomiting. At least, that was Aleksei’s thought. He knew other fathers who told their sons the whole truth, and knew too how odious those sons grew up to be. But it meant that, for Dmitry, any story he told his father of his army life would be a stab in the dark, risking, in the one extreme, shocking his sensibilities, and in the other his silent contempt.

‘A couple of hours, at most,’ he replied, ‘though I’ve done the return journey quicker.’

‘You never told me what happened,’ said Dmitry.

‘You never needed to know.’

‘I think I do now.’

Aleksei nodded. ‘It was before Bonaparte reached Moscow – around the time of Borodino. We’d all headed out west to do what we could to stop him. The twelve Oprichniki and me, Dmitry, Vadim and Maks, divided up into four groups. We got separated, but made it back to Moscow. I met up with Dmitry, who told me that Maks was a French spy – that he’d handed three of the Oprichniki straight over to the enemy.’

‘Did you believe him?’

‘I don’t know if I did at the time, but he was quite right. Maks got a message to me through . . . well, it doesn’t matter – through a contact. It said to meet him at the place we’re going to now. I went there, more slowly than we’re going, making sure I wasn’t followed.’ He looked around. They were out of the city now. ‘Not much has changed,’ he added.

‘And when you got there?’

‘And when I got there, I found Maks. He confessed to everything – everything he thought I knew. Told me he’d happily handed over
the Oprichniki to be executed by the French; told me he’d been spying for them since Austerlitz – that was in ’05.’

‘I know that, Papa.’

‘Sorry,’ said Aleksei, momentarily brought back to the present. ‘Of course you do. The thing is, what Maks didn’t tell me was that he’d discovered the Oprichniki had their own agenda.’ They were vampires; that was the simple, straightforward way to put it. But even if he hadn’t wanted to protect his son from such dangerous knowledge, the very word, spoken out loud on this sunny autumn morning in an era when modernity had expelled all such notions from educated people, would have been greeted with laughter.

‘They weren’t on our side, then?’ asked Dmitry, forcing his father to continue the story.

‘Up to a point, but when there were no more French for them to rob’ – ‘rob’, that was a nice way to put it – ‘they turned on the Russians.’

‘I can’t imagine many Russians had anything worth taking at the time,’ said Dmitry.

‘“From him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him,”’ replied Aleksei. ‘They were very devout.’

‘But Maks told you everything?’

‘About himself, but not about them. And before he could, they arrived.’

‘They’d followed you?’

‘Your Uncle Dmitry had found out where Maks was, and told them. They got there soon after I did.’ After dark.

‘They wanted justice?’

‘They wanted revenge,’ spat Aleksei, adding more calmly, ‘but it’s a moot point. I was outnumbered – I couldn’t stop them. But I should have stayed.’

‘You wanted to see him die?’

‘I wanted to see him live, just a little longer. But I wanted to live myself, and that seemed more important at the time. Eventually I came back – to bury him.’

‘When was that?’ asked Dmitry.

‘About two months later, when your Uncle Dmitry and I travelled side by side down this very road, just as you and I are doing now.’

‘So you’d reconciled with Dmitry by then?’

Aleksei was about to answer, but found he could not. Had he ever truly accepted Dmitry’s complicity with the Oprichniki? He felt now, in 1825, that he had, but he had only reached that acceptance in the years after Dmitry’s death. ‘Just about,’ he answered, rather than be forced to explain.

‘I guess he was as much in the dark as you were as to what the Oprichniki were really up to.’

‘Oh, he knew all right.’ Aleksei paused to recollect, but realized he could not leave the issue hanging. ‘Don’t worry, Mitka, you’re nothing like your namesake.’ Aleksei spurred his horse on a little, and pulled away from his son.

‘I never thought I was,’ muttered Dmitry.

He is here. Come at once.

The letter had taken nine days to reach Ragusa. The uprising of the Greeks against the Turks made all communication hazardous, but they had chosen their couriers with care. Now there were only a few final preparations to be made, but little could be done immediately. A heavy curtain hung over the window and behind it were wooden boards, but still it was obvious that the sun had risen outside. The atmosphere was oppressive, nauseating. Sleep was the best escape. He would have slept already, but for the anticipation – for the last three mornings – that the letter would arrive.

He screwed it up and threw it into the unlit fireplace. It would burn when the next guest stayed in this room – one who needed the comfort of physical warmth. Even if it was found and read, it did not matter. He would be long gone and no one would know where to follow him.

Sleep: that was the thing for now. At sunset he would make
things ready. Even then, there would be no need to rush. The journey would not begin until the small hours of the morning. That was the safest way. And for now, sleep. Patience came easily after so long an existence as his. He had waited over a hundred years and soon he would claim what he was rightfully owed.

Over a hundred years, and yet as he lay down, he felt he could still taste that noblest of blood on his lips.

They arrived at Desna before noon. Not quite at Desna – the small, abandoned wooden hut was a little north of the village.

‘We’re early,’ Dmitry said.

‘I know,’ his father replied.

Aleksei tied up his horse, using a tree some way from the hut. Dmitry did likewise, then strode across the open patch of dusty ground that stood between them and the wooden building.

‘Stop!’ hissed Aleksei. There was an urgency to his voice that demanded instant compliance. Dmitry paused, the toe of his left boot barely kissing the ground where he had begun to lift it. He looked around him, turning only his head, expecting to see some snake sidling towards him through the dirt, if not worse. There was nothing.

Aleksei came up to him quickly and knelt down beside him, staring at the ground as though he were a doctor attending to a patient prostrate on a couch. Then his eyes scanned the surrounding area, glancing at trees, and often at the hut – at the landscape itself. He stood and walked a few paces back the way he had come, picking up a stick of wood from the ground before returning. He scanned his surroundings again, in the same way as before, and then began to draw markings in the soil. It was a very simple shape.

Four straight lines, forming a rectangle, slightly taller than the height of a man, and slightly wider than a man’s shoulders.

Aleksei stood and stared silently at his work for a few moments, then headed towards the hut, skirting around the rectangle rather
than walking across it. Dmitry, still poised in his frozen stance, relaxed and let his foot return to the ground. Then he followed his father – followed his route exactly. He could easily guess what those lines in the earth represented.

‘It hasn’t changed,’ said Aleksei.

He stood in the doorway of the hut, his hand clutching the loop of rope that served as a door handle. His eyes scanned the walls and ceiling. He stepped inside, and Dmitry followed. The strangeness in his father’s mood that had gradually come upon him during the last few versts of their journey had not abated. There was a madness to him – to the look in his eyes – an almost deliberate madness that he had brought upon himself so that he might confront his fears; as if he had reasoned that only a madman would return here.