The White Russian (42 page)

As they passed the barracks of the Lithuanian Regiment, a group of soldiers hurried to the iron railings to cheer them on. “We’re with you,” one shouted. “Show the dogs,” another called. As they walked along, more soldiers came to the railings. A few started to sing the first bars of “ La Marseillaise ” and the song was taken up by the crowd.

There was a shot from inside the compound and a series of barked orders from the officers.

Ruzsky was swept on.

Half a minute later, there was another shot. Ruzsky began to wonder if this was the beginning of the end.

Was this revolution? What plans had Borodin sought to involve him in?

The strikers were silent as they marched over the bridge. Across the river, the city’s ornate and classical domes were swathed in moonlight.

Occasionally, one of their number would cough, but otherwise the only sound was of hundreds of feet crunching against the snow-covered ground.

Maria had been pushing forward, so that now they were once again nearing the front of the crowd. There was more space here and Ruzsky caught up with her. “What happened-”

She turned to him, her eyes blazing. “I never asked you to get involved,” she hissed.

Ruzsky took hold of her arm, but she shook it free. He looked around to be sure that others had not witnessed the gesture, but saw only grim concentration; they expected the worst.

As they came to the far side of the bridge, the protesters wheeled right. Ruzsky turned to see if Borodin was still watching them. He heard muffled cries.

The snow had shielded the sound of the horses’ hooves and the Cossacks were close, approaching fast, heads low and sabers raised.

For a brief moment, it was unreal and almost beautiful: the dark horses against white snow and moonlight glinting off swords held high above the soldiers’ heads.

They thundered silently toward the marchers, snow flying up around them.

The protesters were suddenly still. There was a single cry and then others. The crowd began to break up at the back. There was a high-pitched scream as the horses reached them and Ruzsky saw the first lightning flash of a saber striking down.

The panic spread in an instant, like wind on water, and Ruzsky was a prisoner of a chaotic, uncontrolled mass. He was almost knocked down, but he used his strength to hold himself upright against the swell. He took hold of Maria and moved forward, pushing through the chaos around him. She did not resist.

White, fearful faces flashed past his eyes as he focused on the broad expanse of Liteiny Prospekt, stretching away into the distance. Maria gripped him, her face wild. “You’re a fool,” she said.

Ruzsky turned and saw that a horse and rider were almost upon them.

In a split second, they would be dead.

Ruzsky could not move.

Then he was pushed violently. For a moment, as he was tumbling toward the flailing hooves, he knew that she had propelled him to his death.

But as he hit the snow, he rolled over in time to see Maria take the full force of the collision, her body like a rag doll. The rider was thrown forward, the horse whinnying as it skidded to its knees.

Ruzsky heard more gunfire, and screaming all around him. Ahead, a group of infantrymen were kneeling in the snow, firing volley after volley above the crowd.

Maria was lying flat on her back. He bent down and took her in his arms. Her eyes were open, but her face was as lifeless as a statue.

Ruzsky ran. He careered into the side of a horse and heard a curse, but kept charging down Liteiny Prospekt.

He heard another volley of shots and more screams. He ran faster, slipping and crashing onto his back as he reached the corner.

As he rolled over, Ruzsky saw a Cossack lash out with his whip against the head of the woman who had been running alongside him. She collapsed.

Ruzsky lay still. They were encircled by three horsemen who were eliminating moving figures one by one until they were just so many black stains upon the white earth. Ruzsky could hear people crying for help. He raised his head and looked back toward the bridge. There was no crowd now.

A young girl had climbed to her feet and was running toward where they lay. A Cossack circled her, shrieking like a banshee, the glint of steel above his head before he slashed down across the girl’s face, cutting it open from the eyes to the chin.

The Cossack yelled again, punching the air with his saber.

Ruzsky edged forward and touched Maria’s alabaster cheek. He heard the thunder of hooves and half turned, but the horse passed within inches of him, kicking snow into his face as its rider sought another figure fleeing for the cover of a nearby house.

Ruzsky stood again and scrabbled for Maria in the snow. She felt pitifully slight, her head lolling back against his arm.

In the distance up ahead he saw a private carriage still waiting outside one of the huge houses, a world away from the gunfire and screams.

Ruzsky ran toward it. He slipped, almost fell, but regained his footing and ran on, the sounds becoming distant echoes as he focused on his destination.

He heard the thunder of a horse’s hooves again and turned. The rider was close, bent for the strike, and Ruzsky stopped suddenly and swerved toward the iron railings of the houses alongside them.

The Cossack swung his whip down, but missed. He spun the horse around, turning on the smallest circle Ruzsky had ever seen, and charged toward them again, his long whip raised high above his head, his saber bouncing up and down at his side.

Ruzsky stood with his legs apart, Maria in his arms, offered up like a sacrifice. He breathed in deeply. “Police!” he yelled. “I’m a police officer!”

He saw the shock in the rider’s eyes and the sudden uncertainty as he lowered the whip and veered away, almost crashing into the railings.

“City police!”

“You shouldn’t be here!” the Cossack shouted. “You shouldn’t be here!” He waved his hand and then wheeled away.

For a moment, Ruzsky stood with his eyes closed, swaying with relief. He tipped himself forward and stumbled into a run, focusing on the carriage ahead once again. When he reached it, he almost threw Maria onto its floor. “The Hospital of St. George,” he shouted.

The startled driver snapped the reins. “Quick,” Ruzsky shouted. “She’s badly hurt.” He knelt over Maria. He checked her pulse and then bent his face low over her own to check that she was breathing.

He couldn’t see any blood, but looked carefully around her scalp, her ears, and her neck. He bent down. “Don’t go,” he whispered. “I’ve only just found you. Please don’t go.”

She didn’t move. Her face was still and cold to the touch.

A crowd thronged the entrance to the hospital. Two orderlies carried a patient on a stretcher out of a motorized ambulance, shouting at the wounded to allow them passage. Ruzsky swept Maria into his arms and jumped down into the snow, trying to push his way through the crowd. “Let me pass,” he shouted.

“Wait your turn!” a woman in front hissed. She turned, half illuminated by the gas lamp high on the wall above the great wooden doors at the hospital’s entrance. She had blood streaming down her face.

Ruzsky swung around, so that he was walking backward. He shoved hard, using his height, weight, and strength to push through the jostling, cursing crowd. He glanced down at Maria, but she hung lifeless in his arms.

There were two soldiers at the entrance to the hospital, trying to keep people back, but he pushed past them into the hallway.

Inside the cavernous reception area, the wounded were lying on the floor in all directions alongside soldiers from the front for whom no bed had been found. There was no one behind the reception desk and nurses in dirty blue and white uniforms, with a red cross on the chest, darted through the lobby trying to avoid cries for help.

The orderlies who had been carrying the stretcher lowered it to the floor in the center of the room and began to shout for assistance. The body of the injured woman was covered with a dark blanket, but her head jerked violently from side to side.

Ruzsky looked down at the woman in his arms. “Maria?” he whispered. But she did not open her eyes.

Ruzsky moved to the far corner and laid her down gently. “I’ll find a doctor,” he said.

He ran through the enormous wooden and glass doors to the ward beyond, the fetid smell that assaulted him so violently unpleasant that he almost gagged. The room was full of the dead and dying, mostly soldiers covered in putrid, leaking bandages. There were many beds, but the injured were laid out on the floor between them and even in the aisle in the middle of the room.

This part of the hospital had once been a school and the tall windows and high ceilings ensured that it was freezing cold, despite the crush of human bodies. Ruzsky saw that several panes on the window closest to him had been broken. Few of the injured had blankets.

He ran forward past the hollow faces of the wounded-mostly peasants with long black beards, many of whom were unlikely to be leaving here alive and returning to their families in the Russian hinterland.

A patient began to scream at the far end of the room and Ruzsky caught sight of a doctor bending over a struggling soldier, trying to restrain him. After a few moments, the medic turned away.

“Doctor?” Ruzsky asked.

He looked up. He was a young man, a boy even, no more than twenty or twenty-one, but his face was as haggard and lined as that of someone twice his age, his eyes glazed with exhaustion. “Doctor, I need your help.”

The man stared at him.

“I need your help.”

“Everyone does.”

“Please, could you come this way.”

“I have work to do.”

“It will only take a minute.”

“Please wait your turn!”

After his explosion, the doctor looked as if he might cry. He put a hand to his face and rubbed his eyes, swaying unsteadily on his feet.

“Just one moment of your time, Doctor.”

“One moment,” he repeated, “my life is measured by moments.”

Ruzsky took his arm and began to lead him carefully down the center of the room. Briefly, it looked as if it might work, but the doctor soon rebelled against the way in which he was being maneuvered.

The doctor released himself from Ruzsky’s grip, turned around, and began to walk away in the opposite direction. Ruzsky ran after him. “Please, Doctor.”

“No!”

Ruzsky swung around in front of him. “Please. For Christ’s sake, don’t make me beg.”

“There are hundreds of patients.”

“But none like her.”

A glimmer of humanity flickered in the doctor’s exhausted eyes. “You’ll have to wait your turn.”

Ruzsky did not respond and the doctor rocked gently on his feet. “Fine. Where is she?”

Ruzsky turned and led the man down into the hallway. Maria lay on the floor, her eyes closed. He knelt down and touched her cheek.

The doctor knelt also.

“Doctor!” an old woman shouted from the other side of the hallway, but he ignored it. Ruzsky noticed that most people around them were waiting with quiet dignity and he felt ashamed, but unrepentant.

“What happened?” the doctor asked, as he took Maria’s pulse.

“The full impact of a horse,” Ruzsky said.

The doctor listened to her chest and then began to check her body with his hands, starting with her head and neck and shoulders and then moving down her chest. She opened her eyes, wincing as he touched her ribs, her face suddenly distorted by pain. She did not make a sound. Relief flooded Ruzsky.

“Any blood?”

He checked her clothes to answer his own question.

“Was she knocked out?”

“Yes,” Ruzsky answered.

“For how long?”

Ruzsky looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes,” he answered. “Perhaps twenty-five.”

The doctor held up three fingers.

“Three,” Maria answered weakly.

“Now?”

“Five.”

There was a piercing, haunting scream from inside the ward ahead of them, the roaring bellow of a wounded lion, but it had no impact whatsoever on the doctor. He covered each of her eyes in turn, checking the response of her pupils to light. He straightened. “Shock,” he said. “Take her home, keep her quiet. If the pain doesn’t lessen, bring her back.”

And before he had even finished his sentence, the doctor had mentally moved on. He stood and stared into the middle distance, oblivious to the cries for help all around him. Ruzsky saw a young boy lying on the floor on the opposite side of the hallway. He was painfully thin, his skin yellow and body wasted. He was with his mother and they both just stared at him.

Ruzsky bent down and scooped Maria into his arms. As he walked toward the exit, she leaned her head against his shoulder, her breath warm against his face.

Ruzsky let her down gently by the door to her apartment and supported her as he fumbled for the keys.

Once inside, he lowered her slowly onto the chaise longue, then took the sheepskin rug from the floor, laid it over her, and set about making and lighting a fire.

As it began to take, he turned to see that she was looking at him.

Ruzsky sat by her feet and they both watched the flames in silence. He moved closer, took her pulse, and then placed his hand against her forehead. He held up three fingers.

She did not respond.

Maria looked up at the changing patterns on the ceiling. The fire crackled loudly. Her skin glowed a soft, honeyed yellow.

“Are you in pain?”

She still did not answer. She closed her eyes.

Ruzsky waited, watching the firelight flickering on her face.

When she had drifted off to sleep, her chest rising and falling rhythmically and without apparent discomfort, he allowed himself to relax a little.