Thirteen Years Later (13 page)

The retinue of coaches and horses finally drew up. Aleksandr went over to his wife’s carriage and held out his hand to help her down. As she smiled at him, and he at her, he worried that she would notice the swelling tear that had formed in his eye. If she did, he hoped she would take it as an outward sign of the emotion he felt at their being reunited. In truth, that was not the cause. The tear was merely a sign that the tsar’s thoughts had once again turned to his beautiful, young, departed daughter Sophia.

‘Mama!’

Domnikiia turned from the window and looked over to Tamara. Tamara grinned, but could detect a falseness in the smile that her mother returned. She had had no reason to call out, except to cause a reaction. It was simple, safe and reliable. Call out ‘Mama!’ and Mama would reply. It was a confusing word though; sometimes people – visitors to the house – would think that Mama Yelena was Tamara’s mama, and she was told not to contradict them. That’s why she thought of her as Mama Yelena, so, when
she spoke to her, she just had to remember not to say ‘Yelena’ and everyone was happy. But she didn’t call her mama ‘Mama Domnikiia’, even though she knew Domnikiia was her name. She was just ‘Mama’ because she was Tamara’s mama. That part was simple.

‘Papa’ was a really difficult word. She never called Valentin Valentinovich Papa, although Rodion did. And Rodion called Mama Yelena Mama. She’d made the mistake once – calling Valentin Valentinovich her ‘Papa’ – and he’d scowled at her, but hadn’t shouted. She remembered him shouting once before at her, when she was very young, and Mama Yelena had said something about Aleksei being
her
friend and this being
her
house, and Valentin Valentinovich hadn’t shouted again.

Aleksei was the man who had started visiting again.
He
was the one that Mama said she should call Papa. She’d told her that before, last time he was here, but Tamara had forgotten. Papa was very nice, whenever he was here, unlike Valentin Valentinovich, who was sometimes nice and sometimes wasn’t. But he was here most of the time, and so, overall, he was nice more often than Papa was. So ‘Papa’ didn’t just mean a different person to her and to Rodion, it also meant a different thing. She preferred her person, but she preferred Rodion’s thing.

‘Mama!’ she shouted again.

Domnikiia turned again. ‘Yes, my darling?’

‘Do you miss Papa?’

Domnikiia smiled, more genuinely this time. ‘Whenever he’s not here. Don’t you?’

Tamara shook her head firmly. ‘I don’t see him enough. If he was here more often, I’d probably miss him when he wasn’t.’

‘He’ll be here for a while. He came back from Desna, didn’t he?’

Tamara nodded. When Papa had left again, so soon after arriving, she’d been upset. She’d woken up early and run into her mama’s room to find her alone and sad. She’d explained that Papa had had to go to Desna, but would be back soon. Tamara vaguely
remembered being told he’d be back soon last time he went away, but he hadn’t been – not soon.

But this time, he had. He’d come home on Wednesday and he’d been there, with Mama, on Thursday morning and this morning.

‘Will he go away again?’

‘You sound like me.’ Tamara frowned. She didn’t understand what her mother was saying. ‘Like a little voice in my head, when I first knew him. “Will he go away again? When will he be coming back?
Will
he be coming back?” But I know now. Lyosha always goes away – and he always comes back. To both of us.’

‘Lyosha?’

‘Lyosha – Aleksei – Papa.’ Domnikiia squatted down and held her arms wide open. ‘Now come over here and give Mama a hug.’

Tamara ran over to her mother. She was not as good at running as some people – certainly not as good as Rodion – so she concentrated on keeping her balance, looking at the floor just in front of her, rather than at the thing she was running towards, as grown-ups do. She knew she had arrived when she felt her mother’s arms around her and felt her own legs dangling beneath her as she was lifted into the air. She wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck and pressed her face into her chest.

‘That’s a good girl, Toma,’ whispered her mother.

‘Will Papa be back today, then?’ asked Tamara.

‘Yes, darling.’

‘Will he be back soon?’

‘I hope so.’ Tamara guessed those last words were spoken to comfort them both.

Domnikiia turned back to the window. Tamara lifted her head and followed her mother’s stare. Down below, towards the end of the street, stood a man. He was too far away to see his face clearly, but stood like a young man does – older than Rodion, but not by much. His hands were buried in his pockets. He was gazing down the main road, but as they looked, he glanced up
at the window, then quickly looked back down, seeming to pay close attention to the horses and carriages that drove past.

‘Who’s that, Mama?’ asked Tamara.

‘I don’t know,’ she replied. There was something in her voice that made Tamara think she was afraid.

S
EAT FOURTEEN WAS EMPTY. IT HAD BEEN FOR OVER AN HOUR
, since the ballet began. Seat sixteen was occupied when Aleksei arrived, by an elderly woman whose bony fingers clutched an old military spyglass, most likely a relic of the Patriotic War. They were quite close enough to the stage for her not to need it to view the performance, but the performance was not the object of her attention. She spent the evening scanning the boxes around and behind them. From time to time, she would nudge her husband – who attended neither to the dancers nor to the audience, but spent most of his evening attempting to catch up on his sleep – and keep him abreast of who it was she had recognized, and sometimes waved to, in the vain hope that, had they possessed a spyglass of equal magnification, they would have recognized her.

In truth, Aleksei’s attention was not much captured by the ballet itself either. In general, he preferred ballet to opera. A ballet was a symphony with performers added to keep the eyes from wandering. An opera was a play with music added to please the ear. He would always prefer the case where music was the primary concern. Moreover, he found the stamp of the dancers’ feet less of a distraction than the warbling of the singers’ voices. The only other work he had seen by Sor had been an opera:
Il Telemaco nell’isola di Calipso
. That had been a long time ago – before Austerlitz. He could scarcely remember it. Tonight he
listened to the music, and enjoyed it – he promised himself to come again and to bring Dmitry – but his eyes rarely settled on the stage.

At first, he constantly glanced around the auditorium, anticipating the arrival of whoever had invited him. Three or four times he made eye contact with someone, half suspecting he had seen some flicker of recognition in their eyes, but it had come to nothing. His presumption was that the person, when they came, would be a stranger, but he kept an eye out for a face that he knew. He had dismissed the possibility that he might really be dealing with Maks, the memories that had returned to him in Desna finally having convinced him that his old comrade was truly dead. But one other face haunted his mind, though he felt sure that it too was the face of a dead man. Nevertheless, he prepared himself to confront once again the tall, blond figure of Iuda.

But as the ballet began and the hubbub of the audience’s conversation died down, the empty seat next to Aleksei became an ever more obvious presence. He had been invited to one particular seat, and the only empty space he could see in the whole theatre was that beside him. He felt sure it would be filled before the evening was out. If not, then perhaps there was a further missive already hidden somewhere beneath the seat, or beneath Aleksei’s own. Aleksei would search them at the end of the evening, along with seat sixteen, if the lady with the spyglass did not hang around for too long.

In the meantime, Aleksei’s attention was captured by the architecture of the theatre itself. He had seen the exterior frequently enough, and indeed had seen it growing up over the years, far grander than the original Petrovsky Theatre it had replaced, which had been reduced to ashes some two decades before. The interior, however, was utterly new to him. The stage itself was wide, high and deep. The scenery for the ballet was impressive enough, but Aleksei mistrusted all such façades, knowing they were only cardboard and paper, and could be gone
by the following evening. He would rather have seen the stage empty, to see its construction instead of having it hidden.

The auditorium was another matter. Like his friend with the spyglass, but with only his own eyes to observe, Aleksei spent much of the evening craning his neck to look at the space around him. He, however, did not look at the audience, but at where they sat. Surrounding the stalls, six circles rose up, layer upon layer, like stacked horseshoes. The highest – and cheapest – was above the level of the massive chandelier which dominated the chamber, illuminated by a hundred candles. Flights of stairs, through which the audience could enter and exit, cut through the rows of seats, great cavernous tunnels that might lead one to who knew where. That this vast room existed in the centre of Moscow, surrounded and hidden by brickwork indistinguishable from that of the buildings around it, was difficult to imagine. Those stairwells were like gateways to another world – to Dante’s Hell. There there had been nine circles, not six, and they were true circles, connected through a complete 360 degrees, and yet Aleksei could easily imagine the audience in each of those balconies as pagans, lechers, gluttons, misers, sloths, heretics, sodomites and panders. He himself was at the very pit of the theatre, the lowest level of hell – that reserved for traitors. He glanced around, but saw no sign of Brutus or Cassius. Neither was his worst fear fulfilled: he did not see Christ’s betrayer – he did not see Iuda. He returned his eyes to the stage.

‘It’s been a long time, Aleksei Ivanovich.’

The voice came from his right. He knew before he had turned his head that the seat next to him was now occupied. He knew also, the realization dawning upon him even as his eyes fell upon the face beside him, both that the voice which had spoken was not Iuda’s and that in his heart he had been utterly convinced it would be.

He saw it first in profile. It was a young man, scarcely more than a boy – perhaps older than Dmitry, perhaps a little younger. He turned, and Aleksei saw something familiar in him, which he
could not place. Aleksei opened his mouth to speak, but the man placed a finger to his lips to silence him. He then pointed to the stage, indicating that they should pay attention to the ballet.

Aleksei turned his head forward, but his attention was not focussed on the exertions on stage. His mind tried to grapple with the possibilities, eliminating first the impossibilities. This was not Maks. He had never thought it would be, but the messages had ostensibly come from him, so it had to be included as a possibility. Any such pretence had now been abandoned. Moreover, it was not Iuda, nor was it Zmyeevich, nor any of the other Oprichniki. And there Aleksei’s logic ran out of facts which it might process. The initial flash of recognition had now vanished, but it had been there. The few words the man had spoken implied they had met before. Perhaps they had, in some fleeting moment Aleksei had long forgotten. But in connection with Maks and Maks’ death, Aleksei could think of no one.

The end of the act came quickly – too quickly for Aleksei, still desperately trying to understand who the man beside him could be.

‘Let me introduce myself.’ The man turned to him again as the hum of conversation in the theatre grew. He offered his hand. ‘My name is Innokyentii Sergeivich; Innokyentii Sergeivich Lukin.’

The Christian name meant nothing to Aleksei, and the patronymic could easily have been a coincidence, but combined with the surname, it was shockingly familiar. Even so, as they shook hands, with Aleksei momentarily as if in a trance, Innokyentii made the connotation clear.

‘I’m Maksim Sergeivich’s brother.’

‘Maks . . .’ gasped Aleksei. Again his mind raced, supplied with this new information. Maks’ brother. Did that explain why Aleksei had seen something he recognized the moment he saw Innokyentii’s face? He could not see anything in it now. Had Maks even had a brother? He had sisters, Aleksei recalled, but could not remember ever hearing of a brother. This man was around Dmitry’s age – much younger than Maks. He would have been
about five when Maks had died. Perhaps a half-brother? If so, the name would suggest that it was their father whom they shared, and yet Aleksei was sure that Maks’ father had died when he was very young. Of course, what did Aleksei really know of Maks? He had never met any of his family, and had only Maks’ descriptions of who they were – the descriptions of a man who had lied for as long as they had known each other about the very matter of his national allegiance. Perhaps he had been hiding his brother, protecting him from the revelation that he was also a French spy. How little did that matter today? France was a monarchy again – an ally of Russia. It made no real difference where Innokyentii’s loyalties lay. Nor Maks’.

‘I didn’t know Maks had a brother,’ said Aleksei directly. ‘You must have been very young when he died.’

‘I understand your suspicions, Aleksei. I could be anyone. Perhaps this will convince you.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded letter, handing it to Aleksei. As soon as Aleksei opened it, he recognized the handwriting – it was his own. The date at the top was 29 August 1812. It began: