David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn & The Courilof Affair (2008) (39 page)

The prince’s carriage had pulled up; he was sitting in the back with a fur blanket over his legs. He held some fresh white roses, cut especially for him, and was stroking them.

I gave him the prescription for the sedative.

“Are you French, Monsieur?” he asked me.

“Swiss.”

He nodded.

“A beautiful country … I’m going to spend a month in Vevey this summer.”

He signalled the driver with a little kick, and the door closed. The carriage set off.

On the road back to St. Petersburg, near the city gates, a
woman—the former fiancee of Gregoire Semenof, who had been waiting for this moment for fifteen years—threw a bomb into the prince’s carriage. They were all blown to bits: the horses, the driver, the elderly man who was peacefully smelling his roses, along with the assassin herself.

COURILOF
LEARNED OF
the assassination that same evening. We were at dinner. One of the officers in the prince’s entourage came in. As soon as Courilof heard the sound of the sabre striking the paving stones, he seemed to guess something terrible had happened. He jumped in fright, so suddenly that he dropped the glass of wine he was holding; it crashed against the leg of the table. But almost immediately, he regained control of himself, stood up and went out without saying a word. Marguerite Eduardovna followed him.

That night I could clearly see his window from my room. His lights were on, and I watched him pace slowly back and forth until morning. I saw his shadow go over to the windows, peer out, turn slowly around, disappear into the other side of the room, then come back into view.

The next day, when he saw me, he just murmured weakly, “Have you heard…”

“Yes.”

He brought his hand to his head, looking at me with his wide, pale eyes.

“I knew him for thirty years,” he finally said.

That was all. Then he quickly turned away and made a weary gesture.

“Well, there you have it… It’s over.”

The next day I received a message from Fanny, which both surprised and worried me, for she was not supposed to take such risks, and it had been agreed she would contact me only to set the date for Courilof’s assassination.

She asked me to meet her in Pavlovsk, about an hour outside St. Petersburg, in front of the Kursaal Concert Hall.

There was a piano and violin recital in Pavlovsk. We met in the entrance, where a great crowd of people were silently listening to
music by Schumann. I can still remember those bright, rapid chords.

Fanny had once again disguised herself as a kind of peasant. I told her rather angrily that we were involved in a game that was theatrical and distasteful enough without making it even more complicated and dangerous with elaborate costumes. Afterwards, in fact, my long experience as a revolutionary taught me that nothing is more likely to destroy a mission than excessive precautions. Beneath her red head-scarf, her long Jewish nose and thick lips would have betrayed her more surely than her real passport. But there was a large crowd; no one saw her, or they thought she was a servant.

We went out into the grounds, where the mist, at dusk, was as thick as a cloud. We sat down on a bench. The fog surrounded us like a dense wall: two steps away, a yew tree was half hidden by a damp, thick, white haze, like the milky sap that comes out of certain types of plants when you cut their stems. Even the air had the sweet scent of foliage, a sickly smell that irritated my throat.

I was coughing. Fanny, annoyed, removed the red scarf from her head.

“Bad news, comrade. Lydie Frankel, who was keeping the dynamite in her house, was killed in an explosion. In Geneva, they decided to hand over that part of the mission to me. I’ll get hold of the bombs when we need them. The assassination will probably be set for autumn. I have some letters for you from Switzerland. “

I took the letters, automatically putting them into my pocket.

Fanny laughed nervously. “Are you really going to keep those letters in your overcoat so they can fall into the hands of the informers? Read them, then burn them.”

I read them; they contained nothing of consequence. Nevertheless, I set fire to them with my cigarette and scattered the ashes about. Fanny leaned towards me.

“Is it true,” she asked eagerly, “is it true, comrade, that you saw Prince Nelrode a few hours before he died?”

“It’s true.”

She questioned me in a low, muffled voice. A savage, doleful
flame lit up her green eyes. I said I’d heard the prince and the minister talking to each other.

She listened to me in silence, but I could see what she was thinking in her eyes. She had come closer and was staring at me.

“What?” she finally said.

She stopped; she seemed unable to find words to express her horror.

“What did they say?”

She drew back nervously. By then, the fog had become so dense that Fanny’s face was half hidden in the mist. I could hear her voice quivering with passion and hatred. As for me, I was tired and annoyed. She pressed me to answer her questions. I angrily told her that in my opinion, they had said a few reasonable things but also talked a lot of nonsense. Yet I could see it was useless to explain to her how these two politicians, who were feared and hated—with their faults, their insensitivity, and their dreams—had seemed as imperfect and unhappy as anyone, including me. She would have read an obscure, secret meaning into my words that they didn’t contain.

Meanwhile, the music had stopped; the crowd came out of the concert hall and slowly dispersed along the paths through the grounds. We went our separate ways.

IT JUST
so happened that the day the widow Aarontchik—the elderly Jewess recommended by Marguerite Eduardovna—came to visit, I was in Courilof’s room. He wasn’t feeling well; his wife asked me to firmly cut the interview short if I thought he was getting weak or tired. Four days had passed since the assassination. No business had been carried out since then. Courilof spent half of each day at the prince’s residence, beside the coffin that contained his mangled remains, with priests who recited prayers imploring peace for the dead man’s soul; the rest of the time, Courilof went to church.

Finally, on the fifth day, the funeral took place.

Several supposed accomplices of the female assassin had been arrested. Courilof wanted to be present when these “monsters, these wolves in sheep’s clothing,” as he called them, were all interrogated. Afterwards, two of them were hanged.

Courilof came home exhausted; he said nothing, except when he was shouting at the servants or employees at the ministry. Only with me did he remain patient and courteous. He seemed to actually feel a kind of sympathy towards me.

The audience granted to the widow Aarontchik had been delayed like all the others. Courilof received her in an enormous room I’d never been in before, full of portraits of the Emperor and mementos of Pobiedonostsef and Alexander III, all in glass frames and labelled like jars in a pharmacy. A dazzling light came in through the half-closed, enormous scarlet curtains; they looked stained with fresh blood. He made a savage picture that was striking to behold: his pale, motionless face above the white linen jacket of his uniform, decorations around its collar, others pinned at the side; his hand rested on the table with its heavy gold wedding band, adorned with a red stone that caught the light.

A small, thin woman was shown in; she was shaking. She had white hair, a bony, angular face, a nose like a beak. She was dressed in mourning clothes that looked tarnished in the sunlight. She took three steps forward, then stopped, dumbstruck.

The minister spoke to her in a deep, low, quiet voice, the one he sometimes used with inferiors who’d been recommended to him.

“You are the widow Sarah Aarontchik,” he asked, “of the Jewish faith?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

Her hands were visibly shaking; she clasped them in front of her and stood motionless.

“Come closer.”

She didn’t seem to understand; she looked up at him, blinking, her eyes full of resignation and a kind of holy terror.

His eyes were lowered, his head thrown back; he was absent-mindedly tapping an open letter on the table, waiting for her to speak.

She remained silent.

“Come now, Madame,” he called out. “You did ask for an audience, didn’t you? You wanted to speak to me. What did you want to say?”

“Your Excellency,” she murmured, “I met your wife, Marguerite Eduardovna…”

“Yes, yes,” he interrupted curtly. “That has nothing to do with the business that brings you here, I presume?”

“No,” she stammered.

“Well then, get to the point, Madame. My time is precious.”

“The Jacques Aarontchik case, Your Excellency.”

He gestured that he knew all about it.

As she said no more, he sighed, picked up a file, leafed through it for a moment and quickly read out loud: “I, the undersigned… denounce Pierre Mazourtchik, junior supervisor… Hmm!… Hmm!… Guilty of having corrupted my son …”

He smiled faintly, took another statement from the table and read out loud: ” ‘I, the undersigned, Vladimirenko, teacher in the secondary school at… denounce one Jacques Aarontchik, of Jewish faith,
aged sixteen, guilty of having incited revolution and subversive acts in his classmates.’ Do you accept these facts as true?”

“Your Excellency, my unfortunate child was the victim of an agent provocateur. I thought I had done the right thing, I denounced his tutor, Mazourtchik, who was making him read these books and things… I’m just a widow, a poor woman. I didn’t know, I couldn’t know …”

“No one is reproaching you for anything,” said Courilof; his icy, haughty tone stopped the woman dead. “What is it that you want?”

“I didn’t know I was dealing with one of Your Excellency’s agents. He also denounced my son. I am just a poor widow.”

I looked at her hands clasped in front of her; they were dirty, with furrows as deep as wounds. It made a horrible impression, and I saw that Courilof was also looking at them, shuddering, but somewhat fascinated. Her hands weren’t marked by some rare disease, but by doing the washing, the housework, by boiling water, by old age.

The minister frowned, and I watched his heavy, impatient hands pushing the files about on the table.

“Your son has been expelled,” he said at last. “I will look into the matter to see if there is reason to believe in his sincere repentance, and I will authorise him to continue his studies, if he proves himself worthy. Up until now, he was the best student at the school, as I can see from his reports, and given his young age … In any case, you have made this great journey, despite being elderly and all alone; if you will be responsible for your son, for his political opinions…” he said, his voice becoming more and more dry and nervous.

She said nothing. He nodded, indicating that the audience was over.

Then, for the first time, she looked at him.

“Your Excellency, excuse me, but he’s dead now.”

“Who’s dead?” asked Courilof.

“He is… my little …Jacques…”

“What? Your son?”

“He killed himself, two months ago, Your Excellency, out of de … despair,” she mumbled.

And suddenly, she began to cry. She cried in a humble, vile way, with a snorting sound that made you feel sick. Her tiny face, dark red, was suddenly covered in tears; her shrivelled, trembling mouth was wet, gaping, hanging open on one side from the violence of her sobbing.

The more she cried, the more Courilof’s face grew heavier, paler.

“When did he die?” he finally asked in his harsh, ringing voice, even though the woman had already told him; but he seemed confused. He spoke automatically, rapidly.

“Two months ago,” she said again.

“Well then, why have you come to see me?”

“To ask for help. He was going to help me, he was about to finish school. He was already earning fifteen roubles a month. Now, I’m all alone. I still have three young children to raise, Your Excellency. Jacques killed himself because he was expelled from school over a mistake. I’ve brought a letter with me from the head teacher, saying it was clearly a mistake, that the papers and books taken from my son’s room had been planted there by Mazourtchik… by Your Excellency’s agent, because we couldn’t pay him the hundred roubles he was demanding. I have all the facts here, the dates, the confession of the guilty party.”

She offered the papers to the minister, who held them in two fingers as if they were rags, then threw them down on the table without even looking at them.

“If I have understood correctly, you are accusing me of your son’s death.”

“Your Excellency, I’m just asking for help. He was only sixteen. You are a father, Your Excellency.”

She was shaking and panting so violently that she could barely get the words out of her mouth.

“But why the hell have you come to me?” he suddenly shouted. “Because of your son? Is there anything I can do about your son? He’s dead, God has his soul! There you have it. Get out of here, you have no right coming here and bothering me with your sad story, do you understand?” he thundered. “Get out of here!”

He was shouting, beside himself, his eyes filled with a kind of
terror; he struck everything on the table so hard that the letters fell to the floor.

The elderly Jewess turned very pale. She started to move, then suddenly, we heard her humble, persistent voice once again: “Just a little help, Your Excellency; you’re a father…”

I looked at Courilof and saw him wave her away. “Go,” he said. “Leave your address at the ministry. I’ll send you some money.”

Suddenly he threw his head back against the chair and started to laugh. “Go!”

She left. He continued laughing; a sad, nervous laugh that echoed strangely.

“Vile old woman, old fool,” he kept saying, trembling with anger and disgust. “So then, we’re going to pay her for her son … Do such creatures deserve any pity?”

I didn’t reply and he closed his eyes, as he often did, weary all ofa sudden.

I tried to imagine his thoughts. But when he opened his eyes, his face was impenetrable once more. I remember thinking about the elderly Jewess; her absurd gesture had revealed such depths of despair, ignorance, and poverty. And on that day, I don’t know why, but for the first time the idea of murdering this pompous fool filled me with horror.