The Romanov Bride (10 page)

And then with a whoop the Cossacks were gone, hurrying off in pursuit of a handful of young men who were fleeing down a side street.

All fell quickly and disturbingly quiet, the silence broken here and there only by desperate sobs, for there were a handful of people lying about in pain. The time-honored and hallowed manner of dealing with dissent or disturbance in Russia had always been the iron fist and, of course, the whip. Like all the Grand Dukes, my husband had been a great proponent of such, for amongst society it was widely believed that our uneducated masses understood nothing but force and could be controlled by nothing but a master’s power from above.

And yet… these were not animals…

Neither were they peasants or workers. No, it all came into my mind quite quickly, for judging by the clothing of those who had fled and of those who were left lying about-clothing that was neither fine nor ragged-these people, all seemingly young, were quite different. What were they, then, who were they?

Overwhelmed by the conflict, I rushed forward. First I came to a young man with the soft face of a boy, the silken blond hair of a child, and a bloody whip mark across his cheek. Reaching out, I helped him to his feet.

“What happened here?” I begged.

“There was a demonstration not far from here… we… we tried to force our way into the city council.”

“We? Who is this ‘we’?”

“A group of us from the University.”

“And this, the shops? Did you do all of this, break these windows and ravage these places?”

“The city is on strike!” said this boyish man in a surprisingly deep voice. “And these shopkeepers defied us. They stayed open during the strike, and so they got their punishment!”

“But-”

We both heard it then, another whoop, more clattering of hooves. Were the Cossacks coming back, or were they merely charging down a nearby street?

“Madame, you must get out of here before they return!” the young man said, turning and hobbling off. “Go, get out of here! Run! They show no mercy!”

He scurried off, as did a few others, terrified of what might come next. But I couldn’t move, so overwhelmed was I by the destruction. Were the people really so desperate? Was this really their only recourse?

Off to the side I saw a woman struggling to rise, and I hurried to her. She was a pretty, young thing, reddish hair, long blue skirt, her fair face now smeared with grime and a curl of blood.

“Please,” I said, reaching toward her with outstretched hands.

She accepted my aid and I pulled her to her feet. For a moment it seemed she might faint, and I clutched her.

“Oi, bozhe moi!” Oh, dear God, she cried, holding her side. “One of… one of them came alongside me and kicked me with his stirrup. But Misha…” she moaned, tears welling in her eyes as she searched the small square. “Where’s my Misha?”

“This Misha, he’s your-”

“My husband…” she said, starting to cry. “Misha! Mishenka, where are you?”

“I’m sure he’s fine, I’m sure you’ll find him. But please, child, let me help you. I know of a small hospital not too far away,” I said, nodding in the direction of my very own place.

I ripped away part of my sleeve, and with this scrap blotted at the blood seeping from her mouth. I prayed that she’d merely broken a rib, that there was nothing more serious damaged within her.

“I can’t leave!” she said almost in panic. “What if he’s lying somewhere? What if he’s hurt and he needs me?”

“Let’s just get you taken care of first. Let me get you to the hospital and I’ll come back and look for your Misha.”

Her eyes welled with a torrent of tears. “But-”

“Come along, the hospital’s just down several streets, just this way.”

“Wait, you can’t mean the hospital run by one of them, do you?”

“Them?” I hesitantly asked, fearful of the answer.

“Yes, them, the Romanovs, I’ve heard it’s run by one of their stupid cow princesses.”

“Why… yes… of course…” I managed to mutter.

“No,” she pleaded. “No, I won’t go there. Haven’t you heard, don’t you know? It’s the talk of the neighborhood.”

I felt a greater pain than any whip or sword could inflict as I inquired, “Know what, my child? What are you talking about?”

“That hospital is for officers and aristocrats only. They say they won’t help any of us!”

“No,” I gasped as if the wind had been knocked from me. “No, I’m quite sure that’s not true.”

“Yes, it is! I heard it from one of the strike organizers. He told us all about it, all about a babushka who went there for help. She was so sick, and all they gave her was dirty water!”

“No!”

“Yes, this striker told me he’d seen it all with his own eyes, that the Romanovs gave this old babushka dirty water with poison and she died the very next day, writhing in pain!” exclaimed the girl. “I won’t go there!”

And with that the girl, painfully clutching her side, hobbled off. Within moments she had disappeared, leaving me paralyzed with grief and with only one shocking thought:

Dear Lord, when and how had we come to be so widely hated?

There were all these papers and leaflets and booklets and pamphlets being passed around by all the different parties, the Social Revolutionaries, the Social Democrats, the Liberals, the Marxists, the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, and so on, this one preaching for a democratic bourgeois republic, another for a constitutional monarchy, still another for a complete socialist revolution. As for me, in the months after we killed the Grand Duke, well, I realized I was a complete Nihilist, the old-fashioned kind. I wanted everything gone, tsar and prince, merchant and factory owner. Death to them all. And all power to the people. That sort of thing.

It was none other than Dora Brilliant, our beautiful bombmaker with those deep, dark eyes, who helped make everything so clear to me. We met that fall near Konny Rynok, where horses were traded, and ducked into one of the many traktiri, the cheap cafés scattered about. Each one of the places in the area was fancied by different pet lovers, one by horse traders, the next by dog owners, and so on. The one we slipped into was full of bird sellers, and so as not to seem suspicious Dora and I made a pretend of turning to the icon and its red lamp by the door and crossing ourselves. Several small yellow Russian canaries twittered in a cage up front, and tables of canary lovers huddled about, drinking tea and arguing about the best grains to feed their treasures, ways to teach song, and so on and so forth.

Dora and I moved directly to the rear of the place, and I ordered a glass of hot tea loaded with four sugars, while she got a tea with two sugars and a slice of lemon, plus a nice white serviette for her lap. Dora, always so sad-looking, so forlorn, took a sip of her tea, and then pulled a piece of paper from her worn leather purse and nearly smiled.

“Here, Pashenka, this is for you,” she said, using the cozy form of my name.

“What, a present?”

“It’s a catechism-you must repeat it daily.”

I looked at her, sure that this was some kind of joke, and repeated exactly what I had learned at one of our recent meetings, loudly whispering, “Christianity is the religion of slaves.”

“Yes, but this catechism is you,” she insisted as she pushed the paper across the table to me.

“What are you talking about? Don’t you know how dangerous it is to tease a bear? Is this some kind of test?”

“Please, just read it to me, Pashenka. It’s The Catechism of a Revolutionary, by Bakunin and Nechayev.”

And though words were not my specialty, and though it took me time to pronounce many of these fancy terms, tears nearly came to my eyes as I began to read and understand what was written.

Keeping my voice hushed so no others could hear, I said, “ ‘The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion-the revolution.’ ”

Dora said, “Do you see what I mean? Is this not you?”

A cool tingling feeling crawled up my spine, and I nodded quickly. Nothing had ever described me so… so completely. I felt these words not just in my ears but deep inside me.

“Only one thing,” I commented. “I still have my name: Pavel.”

“Well, from now on you have no family name, you are simply that: Pavel, a man of the people.”

“Right,” I said, liking the sound of that. “My family, my wife, my village-they are all gone.”

“Your entire past is over-nothing, no more.”

I nodded strongly, and continued: " ’Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, the Revolutionist has severed every link with the social order of the civilized world-with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose-to destroy. He despises public opinion. He hates and despises the social morality of his time, its motives and manifestations.’ ” I took a deep breath and asked her, “What does this ‘manifestation’ mean?”

“Ah… it’s like showing something, like bowing to the Tsar, like bowing to him is a manifestation of your respect for him.”

“Ach, the Tsar-k chyortoo!” To the devil, I exclaimed, and then read on. “ ‘Everything which promotes the success of the Revolution is moral, everything which hinders it is immoral. The nature of the true Revolutionist excludes all romanticism, all tenderness, all ecstasy, all love.’ ”

I put the paper down and looked away. I looked through the months and I looked through my memory to that past January. Everything that was sweet, anything that was tender, and all that I could ever have felt for another person died with my wife and unknown child there on the pure white snow. And what was reborn in this shell of my body was dark and black and hateful.

Dora poked at me, asking, “So what do you think?”

I nodded. “Yes, these words… they are me, one hundred percent me.”

“Then will you do it?”

“Do what?”

“We are succeeding,” began Dora, carefully choosing her words. “We are being energized. It’s no longer we Revolutionaries leading the movement but the common working men and women of the factories and the simple field peasants, all wanting more than just a few crumbs and more than a disgusting hovel to live in. Everywhere-everywhere!-they are striking and marching, tens and even hundreds of thousands of them. The Revolution is growing with each day, but…”

“But?” I asked.

“We are in great danger of failure, Pavel. We are too many groups, too many ideas, too many voices. Our great wave of dissatisfaction is about to break into a million drops on the rocks rather than crash as one onto the beach and wash away everything we hate. And the Romanovs know this and are using this against us. As Caesar said, ‘Divide and Conquer.’ ”

“Divide and what? Who is this… this Caesar?” I asked.

“A tsar from another country who lived many, many years ago. And what that means for us is that if we are separated into small groups and not united, the Tsar and the capitalists can walk all over us and smash us like beetles, and everything we have worked so hard for will be ruined forever.”

I didn’t understand all of her educated words and ideas, but the peasant in me did understand one thing: Dora had a plan, and that plan involved me.

“So what is it you want me to do?”

Staring at me as seriously as a gravedigger, she quietly said, “This Christmas-in two months’ time-we want you to dress in disguise as a chorister.”

I laughed. “But, Dora, me? A chorister? Dear sister, I could never go in disguise as someone like that. Why, I have the ear of a toad!”

“Don’t worry, you won’t even get to the singing part. To make sure our great revolution is not broken apart but washes everything away, we want you to dress as a chorister… and send you with a group right into the heart of the beast, the Aleksander Palace.”

“You mean-”

“Yes, directly into the Tsar’s own home. We want you to carry a bomb beneath your robes, and when the Tsar himself comes into the room to hear the beautiful voices we want you to throw that bomb right between his feet. What do you think?”

This idea-right away it made me feel good. I glanced across the room and saw several bird traders-or were they police spies?-come in. After a moment, I took a sip from my glass, but more than just the tea warmed my insides.

“I think this is right,” I said calmly. “I think I will be happy to do this.”

“But, Pavel, it will most certainly mean the death of women and children, which you didn’t want to do before, remember?”

“That was, well… it was different before. Somehow it was different.”

“Yes, now we have awakened the masses and we are at war. Almost the entire country is on strike and the Tsar and his princes and capitalist warmongers are afraid, so they have sent his troops after us.” She took a long sip of the hot tea, wiped her mouth with her special serviette, and added, “Pavel, before you give a final answer you must think seriously about this. You must think long and hard, because if you throw the bomb it will most certainly mean your own death as well, either from the bomb or from hanging.”

Looking directly into her nightlike eyes, I said, “Don’t forget, I was the only one to see Kalyayev dangling there from the gallows, and I want that too. I want to face death with such bravery, just like him. Yes, I can tell you without hesitation: I would be happy to die for the Revolution, the sooner the better. And if this means killing others so that things get better for the collective, then why not?”

“Exactly,” replied Dora, reaching out and clutching my hand. “Our duty is to make sure things keep going forward, and by eliminating the Tsar we will make sure of one thing for certain: that there is no going back.”

Just then one of the tiny yellow canaries up front began whistling. But rather than chirping beauty and delight, it began singing “God Save the Tsar.”

“Ach,” I moaned. “What do you think, Dora, shall I go up and strangle that bird right this minute?”

“No, Pavel, just be patient. I’ve heard it said that it takes about a year and a half to train those things.” Smiling for the second time that afternoon, she said, “And I would wager you a gold ruble that within two years’ time all the birds around here will be singing the ‘Internationale.’ ”