City of Silence (City of Mystery) (8 page)

The
symmetry of the plan had been perfect; the execution, less so.  Fifteen
university students were caught within minutes of leaving the grounds of the
school.  Ten of them had talked, and lived.  Five of them, including Sasha, had
refused to divulge particulars or name comrades, and thus had swung from the
gallows.

Sasha’s
death was the first horrible thing – perhaps also the first significant thing -
which had ever happened in Vlad’s life.  He had adored his brother, so much so
that their mother loved to tell the story of how when Vlad was merely four she
had asked him if he would prefer to take his oatmeal with butter or milk and he
had replied “Like Sasha.”  No matter what the question, throughout the
subsequent years this had always been Vlad’s answer.  He would do it like
Sasha.  

Having
approached the perimeters of the palace some blocks back, Vlad paused at one of
the gates and considered the iron bars. The bottoms were thick and utilitarian
while each top was sculpted into the shape of a Romanov eagle and dipped in
gold.  He peered within, pushing his face against the fence like a child.  In
the summer the copse of trees surrounding the palace created a thick green
curtain that was nearly impossible to see through, and yet he knew well enough
the size and shape of the building beyond.  The guard posted to this particular
entrance glanced at him without interest. 

The
executions had been carried out so swiftly that Sasha had probably never known
the lengths his mother had gone to in her efforts to save his life.  Vlad hoped
he did not know.  To plead for mercy in a worthwhile cause is a failure of
principle.  To plead for mercy unsuccessfully is the ultimate humiliation.  But
Vlad did not blame his parents.  They were bourgeois.  French was a disgusting
sounding language in general, but he had always considered that word, bourgeois,
to be the ugliest of then all, and the revolution had taught him that families
of the middle class are susceptible to a very specific type of fantasy: the
belief in gradual progress.  His parents had been delighted when Sasha was
accepted at St. Petersburg University.  A move upward, a step in the right
direction, a path that Vlad might someday follow. They could not have imagined
that the young intelligentsia of Russia had become a fiercely malcontented lot,
more concerned with dismantling the world than prospering in it, or that Sasha,
more through kindness than in sham, would be careful to hide his evolving
political beliefs from his affectionate mama and papa. So when the police had
come knocking at the door on that spring morning two years ago, shouting that
their oldest son had been arrested in a botched assassination attempt, this
unexpected news was more than Vlad’s parents could grasp.  His father had gone
into his study and shut the door.  His mother had sat down at the kitchen table
and begun writing a letter to the tsar. 

A
letter to the tsar. Only the most innocent of women would believe such a
missive would ever be delivered or read and besides, what would it have said?   
Yes,
my son tried to shoot you, but he’s a good boy, really.  He just fell in with
the wrong sort of crowd at school. 

Fifteen
year old Vlad had silently stood among the weeping, and for the first time had
seen his own life clearly.  His parents believed that history was linear, that
events moved at a steady pace, much like a military parade.  They believed that
those who ruled deserved to rule and thus that the world they created was
understandable and fair. They may has well have believed in fairy tales.  After
her letter to the tsar had been posted, Vlad’s mother had wrapped a loaf of the
dark rye bread that had been Sasha’s favorite in a cloth and gone straight to
the jail, begging to see her son, pleading for an interview with the panel
which had condemned him. 

Neither
request had been granted.  The bread had gone uneaten.  They would never have
rye in the house again.  

Vlad
moved closer to the guard and said something about being a student of botany, a
statement aimed at explaining his apparent fascination with the trees around
the palace.  This was not true.  It was Sasha who had studied botany, who had
spent his boyhood exploring the banks of the Neva and the broad meadows outside
of town, looking for particular types of ferns and flowers.  Calling them by
their Latin names, pressing them within the pages of the family Bible.  It was
Sasha who had the gift of seeing the whole world in a single leaf, who claimed that
the happiest moment of his life was when he had first looked through a
microscope in the university laboratory.  The guard might not have been so
blasé had he known that the young man whose hands were gripping the iron bars,
the one peering so intently through the railing, was instead in his first year
of law school at the university which had so thoroughly schooled his brother,
or that he had not drifted mindlessly into the great maw of politics, but
rather had sought out the Volya on the very day he had registered for his first
class.   

For
Vlad was filled with regret, sickened with it like a fever that refused to
leave his body.  Regret that he had not tried harder to understand Sasha’s love
of nature, even regret that he had mocked Yulian’s passion for dance.  When
Yulian had brought that girl, his Katya, to the café, Vlad had been the only
one of the comrades who had not walked across the room to shake her hand.  That
young poet who was always with them, whose name he could not now recall -  the
boy had claimed to know fifty of Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart.  He had quoted
one for the occasion of Katya’s first day among them as Vlad had sat there
scowling, in the far dark corner where he generally sat.  He had such contempt
for the scene before him - the sonnets, the pressed leaves, and most especially
Yulian turning his little Katya first one way and then the other, showing her
off just as he likely did when they were dancing.  Smiling with pride, as if he
were the first boy who had ever found a girl, as if he had invented them, as if
the fates of two people could matter more than the fate of the revolution.  Blasphemy.

The
men in the café that day were a very specific type of Russian.  The kind who
believed in poetry and beauty and love and already, his puberty barely behind
him, Vlad well knew that he was not that sort of man.  Women were either whores
or comrades – or, in some rare and exceptionally convenient cases, both – but
they would never be his weakness.  And so Vlad had felt superior indeed on that
day as he had watched Yulian making a fool of himself over Katya, spinning her
before the others as the poet said some grand words in English, and Vlad had
leaned his chair against the wall, smoking his cheap cigarettes.

They
were all dead now.  Yulian, the poet, even the spinning girl.  In retrospect he
was sorry he had not shaken her hand.

Vlad
had no doubt there would be many more martyrs before this business was finished
and he also knew that the best men would go first.  The idealists would fall in
the earliest days while the men like him – those who preferred whores and
newspapers to ballerinas and sonnets - would survive a bit longer.  Perhaps he
would even live to the end.  What sort of world was this, he sometimes wondered,
where the better men went out in an early blaze of glory while the lesser ones
trudged on?  For Vlad knew he was one of these lesser men.  He knew this in his
heart and if he ever had doubted it, the world around him stood as a constant
reminder that he was but a pale echo of his handsome, brilliant, heroic older
brother.  His parents kept a religious shrine to Sasha at home, candles and a
host of icons, all those flat faced Orthodox saints who had collectively failed
to save him.  And the Volya maintained a tribute of a different sort, flags and
pictures of the dead boys, their school portraits clustered on a wall in a shabby
room. But both the godless and the god-fearing were in agreement upon this one
point: that Sasha Ulyanov had been entirely too fine for this world.

A
carriage approached the gate and the guard stiffened to attention.  Vlad and a
few other curiosity seekers stepped aside as the bars were wrested apart to
allow entrance.  The carriage rolled to a stop slowly and there was a bit of
business with the horses, one of them proving reluctant to turn.  Plenty of
time for Vlad to look through the glass window and observe the three passengers
inside:  a laughing boy his own age, his amused attention directed toward a
younger girl who had her face screwed up in some sort of crude jest.  She was
imitating someone - mocking them, Vlad realized.  A governess or schoolmistress
most likely, some thankless imperial servant who had failed to earn the approval
of her spoiled young charge.   And one of her brothers was entertained by her
brattish outburst while the other, the solemn young man positioned on the seat
across from them, was not.  This was the tsesarevich, the heir, as handsome as
he was claimed to be and dignified too, observing his younger siblings with the
world-weary tolerance of the first born.  It was an expression Vlad had seen
before, on the face of Sasha.

They
are a family, he thought.  They are, when it is all said and done, no more than
a family.

The
tsesarevich was the same age as Gregor Krupin, the same age Sasha would have
been if he lived.  Twenty, perhaps twenty-one.  A man on the brink of owning
the world.  And just as the gates finally finished their slow yawn and the
carriage rumbled back to a start, the tsesarevich glanced out the window.  The
eyes of Nicholas Romanov locked, very briefly, into the eyes of Vlad Ulyanov
and Vlad saw in those eyes a sort of resignation, an implied shrug.  A Russian
is not supposed to look directly upon the tsar.  It is too bright, too
dangerous, like looking directly into the sun and yet the eyes of the two young
men met, even if just for a second.  What was there to be done about it now?

A
church bell chimed twice.  It was time to return to the small dark room where
they all met.  It was in the back of a bank, yet another irony, but the
comrades were largely just like Vlad, the sons and daughters of the middle
class, and the father of one of them worked in this building, had gotten them
the room under the foolish impression they were using it to study.  The Volya
met every afternoon and Gregor would be there, even today, even as his brother
lay dead, for to mourn one human life above another contradicted everything in
his philosophy.  On the day before he got the news of Yulian’s murder, Gregor
had just returned from one of his recruiting trips to the nearby farms.  Vlad had
sensed that the trip had been a colossal failure, although Gregor had not used
the word.  Instead he described how he and the others had worked side by side
with the farmers, intending to show them that their hopes lay in joining the
Volya, the party, that the goals of collectivism should be their future too. 
But the farmers had shown little interest in politics.  They were tired at
night.  They wanted to eat their bread, drink their vodka, tumble their wives,
and go to sleep, not to talk of revolution.  They were not interested in a
glorious tomorrow. The real one would come soon enough.

Gregor
had laughed as he told Vlad these stories.  He had held out his fine white
hands, a student’s hands, now covered with cuts and blisters, and he had said
“The revolution is for them but it shall not be by them,” and then he had
thrown back his head and roared, as if it were all a great joke.  For it was,
in a way. The students of the Volya would have to save the peasants who would
not save themselves.   They were simple souls, really, and in dire need of
rescue by men like Gregor and Vlad.  These boys from the university – for yes,
the ironies are now stacked like firewood, are they not, leaned one upon the
other to make this great blaze – it was the boys from the university who could
see what the men in the fields could not.  That progress is not a slow and
steady thing, the result of years of careful planning.  It comes in sharp,
thrust upon us all at once.  The only sound that truly changes the world is the
sound of a bomb.

Gregor
had said this and Vlad had nodded.  Their brothers may be saints but they were
survivors, and survivors must make their strange alliances.  There were times
when Vlad thought he hated Gregor as much as any Romanov, because on that
horrible day two years before when five bodies had swung, Gregor Krupin’s had
not been among them.  Vlad did not know for certain and would never know, but
he suspected that Gregor had been one of the ten boys who had talked. 

The
carriage had rolled to a stop before a great entrance, high blue doors at the
top of marble stairs.  Through the wall of leaves Vlad could catch glimpses. 
The girl jumped from the door of the carriage, not waiting for assistance from
a servant and the younger of her two brothers scrambled out after her.  She was
wearing a white dress with a red sash around her waist and the ribbon in her
hair was the exact same color. There was laughter coming through the trees and
Vlad closed his eyes at the sound.  This was where his hate belonged, on these pretty
parasites with their sashes and ribbons. 

Vlad
knew that someday he would supplant and dispose of Gregor, and that he would
take pleasure in that shedding, but for now he must keep his focus where it
mattered.  You do not have to like a man to use him.  Besides, the betrayal of
a whole race of people was a greater crime than the betrayal of a single man. 
It had to be.  Evil was numerical, measurable, subject to the same laws of math
as a crate of apples.  Each day these royals were allowed to live, a hundred
peasants died in their place.  In the mine shafts, the sewers, the factories
and the fields, they sputtered and coughed and bled and died, casually
sacrificed to support the Romanovs and their world of elegance and ease.