Twelve (13 page)

'He did this?' I tried to sound disbelieving, but just as I was in my heart of hearts unsurprised by the discovery that Maks had been a spy, so I was unsurprised to find that Dmitry could treat a woman like that for his own ends. I'd never known him do it in the past – but there was no inconsistency I could find between the action and what I knew of his character. 'He wanted to know where Maks was, I suppose.'

She didn't answer, but buried her face in my chest and began to cry. Her self-imposed silence so far had been out of fear that she would be unable to control herself. Now she had told me the one important fact that she had to convey, she indulged herself in the pleasure of the abandonment of self-control, and indulged me in the pleasure of being her comforter. Yet she still had one more thing to tell me.

'But I didn't tell him, Lyosha,' she let out through her sobs. 'I didn't. I didn't.'

I could find in my heart no blame for her for having betrayed Maks to Dmitry, and so I was happy to allow her the deception, both to me and to herself. For me it was a relief that she had had some unarguable justification for telling Dmitry. I had pushed to the back of my mind the suggestion made in Desna by Filipp that Domnikiia had helped them, but it had worried me. Even now, though, I had underestimated Domnikiia.

'
I
told him,' said Margarita, still shuttling back and forth between her room and the trunk.

'Why?' I asked.

Margarita looked up from the trunk, slightly surprised. Then she gestured towards Domnikiia with her eyes before looking back at me. 'Wouldn't you?'

After a few moments, Domnikiia pulled away from me and continued with her packing.

'Where are you heading to?' I asked.

Domnikiia was still unwilling to talk, so Margarita answered for her. 'Yuryev-Polsky.' It was a sound choice; 150 versts to the north-east and well off the route that the French would take even if they did march beyond Moscow. If they were to go any further, it was generally assumed, it would be north-westwards, towards Petersburg. If the fall of Moscow did not precipitate the fall of Russia then the capture of Petersburg – so the French would reason – most surely would.

'Do you need money?' I asked, taking from my pocket a wad of banknotes, which I had intended to give to them – well, to Domnikiia at any rate.

'No,' Margarita replied, then, realizing she sounded ungrateful, added, 'but thank you. Pyetr Pyetrovich is taking care of all of us.'

I tried to show no reaction to the name. Pyetr Pyetrovich was the owner of the building in which I now stood and – in effect, if not in law – the owner of Domnikiia, Margarita and the other girls. On the few occasions when I had met him, he had seemed most amiable and to be completely understanding of my reasons for visiting Domnikiia. But, just as the girls themselves would change their personalities to please the tastes of the client at hand, I'm sure that he would be all things to all men, so that he might gain their custom.

'Protecting his business?'

'I suppose,' replied Margarita.

Domnikiia came away from her packing and, with a murmured 'thank you', took two of the banknotes from my hand. It wasn't a huge amount, but it was strange how the significance of money in our relationship had become so inverted over the past few days.

When I paid her for sex, it had been a symbol of our distance – our independence. Now she took it from me for nothing, to show that she would rather be dependent on me than on Pyetr Pyetrovich. That, at least, was my interpretation.

'When are you leaving?' I asked.

'Tomorrow,' Margarita told me. 'First thing.'

'I'll come and see you again this evening,' I said and made to leave.

'I'll have to let you out,' said Margarita.

'No, I'll go,' Domnikiia told her, her voice now returning to something of its familiar brightness.

'Are you going to be all right?' I asked her at the door.

'We'll be fine,' she said casually. 'Yuryev-Polsky is a nice long way away.'

'No, I meant you.' I raised my hand to stroke her bruised cheek, but refrained for fear of hurting her. She took my hand in hers and pressed it against her face, caressing it and once again running her fingers over what remained of mine.

'These wounds will heal,' she said. 'It was just that . . . It's been a long time.' She smiled, almost nostalgically. 'I'd got used to not being beaten. That's what makes it worth working for Pyetr Pyetrovich.'

I felt her fingers on mine and I knew what she meant. Even wounds like mine, which would never heal, can be forgotten. But the terror of how they were inflicted cannot. A deep hatred for Dmitry welled up inside me. In my concern for Domnikiia, I'd almost forgotten that it was my friend who had done this to her; my friend and therefore my fault. And since there was little I could do to physically punish myself, all my anger became focused on him.
He
had caused her this pain,
he
had sent the Oprichniki after me and Maks and
he
had torn apart my world by exposing Maks as a spy in the first place.

'I'm going to find Dmitry,' I said, making it clear from my tone what I intended to do when I found him. Then I kissed her. 'I'll see you this evening.'

I had half expected her to make some plea for me to be lenient on Dmitry, but none came. I admired her all the more for her desire for retribution. As I walked away, I heard the sound of the heavy bolts being drawn across the door behind me.

I went back to the inn and still found no sign of Dmitry or Vadim, but there was a note slipped under my door. It read simply:

We would meet the following day, the thirtieth of August, at eleven in the morning at location
7. This meant on the south bank of the Moskva, opposite the Kremlin. The initials 'B' and '
' indicated that it was from both Vadim and Dmitry. With the enemy almost upon us, it was a wise precaution for us not all to be billeted in one place. I was lucky that they had already made the decision and thus I was the one who did not have to relocate – at least not for the time being.

That afternoon I wrote two letters. The first was to Marfa. There was not much of importance to tell. I mentioned the Battle of Borodino – skipping over my small part in it – and the debate as to whether it was a defeat or a victory, and then went on to downplay the evacuation of Moscow. It was all really just padding before I got on to the subject of Maks. Maks had stayed with us in Petersburg for several months after his repatriation in 1807 and Marfa had met him a few times since, becoming quite fond of him.

I told her as close to the truth as I dared; that he had been a French spy, that he had sent some comrades to their deaths at the hands of the French, that he had confessed it and that he had been executed. Reading back through my sanitized account, I could see that no one could have any reason to feel sympathy for Maks. No one would question that he deserved to die for his treason, or even blame me for letting the Oprichniki carry out the sentence. So I added a few words in defence of Maks, the same defence which still led me to question my own actions. I wrote of his idealism, his admiration for the Revolution and for Bonaparte and of his refusal, in spite of all these, to do anything that would betray his true friends.

The second letter was to Maksim's mother, Yelizaveta Malinovna. I had never met her – she lived far away in the south, in Saratov – but Maks had often spoken of her, not with fondness (that was not his style) but with, I suppose, loyalty. I laughed to myself as the word entered my head, but I had to admit that Maks was no less loyal than most, his loyalty was simply placed elsewhere. Maks' father had died of dysentery when Maks was very young. His only other close relatives were two sisters, but I didn't know where they lived. Yelizaveta Malinovna would forward the tragic news. In my letter to her I made no mention of treachery. Maksim had died like a hero fighting the French. I was unable, I explained, to give full details for reasons of national security, but I gave enough background for her to infer, once the histories of the war had been published, that he had died bravely at Borodino.

After I had written the two letters, recounting Maks' death to both my wife and his mother, I realized that I had completely forgotten to tell Domnikiia. In hindsight, it may have been a wise decision. She had to be told, but the timing and the approach had to be well considered. That, however, hadn't been the reason for my not telling her. It had simply slipped my mind. The death of one of my closest friends, with my collaboration, at which I had wept all through my journey back from Desna, had been pushed out of my mind by the sight of a few bruises on my lover's face. I was a very fickle man.

True to my promise, I returned to see Domnikiia that evening. As I made my way through the city, the streets still pulsated with the flow of people and their possessions and of retreating soldiers. The proportion of soldiers was increasing as more and more wounded came into the city. Some could walk, others were carried on stretchers by their companions and still others lay, conscious or otherwise, on flat wagons, the dying mixed indiscriminately with the dead. It may not have been that all of the 30,000 Russian casualties came through the city over those few days, but it seemed very close to it.

When I arrived, the brothel was still closed and the door bolted. This time, a stone at the window attracted the attention of Domnikiia herself. She came down and I suggested that we should walk for a while. We were away from the main thoroughfares of the city and so the streets and squares were a little quieter. We were not the only couple that wandered the streets of Moscow that night, hand in hand, knowing that they would soon be parted.

After some talk and some silence, I came to the point.

'Maks is dead,' I announced quietly.

'I didn't like to ask.'

We walked on in silence for a little longer. 'Don't you want to know what happened?'

'Yes,' she replied, 'but you don't have to tell me.'

'He was a traitor.' I didn't offer any more detail and I felt confident she wouldn't ask.

'I liked him,' she said after a pause. To her, as to me, liking him was quite orthogonal to his being a spy. There are likable traitors and hateful patriots.

'So did I.'

'Did he know that?'

'Yes,' I said with a misunderstanding laugh. 'We'd known each other seven years.' Except, of course, I hadn't completely known him.

'I mean at the end. Did he know that you
still
liked him?'

Did it really matter what a man felt in the last few minutes of his life, compared with all the things he's felt in the years leading up to that? Perhaps now, less than a day after Maks' death, those final minutes mattered more than they would in ten years' time when his whole life could be viewed from a distance. Mattered more to me, I meant, not to him. I doubted whether I could have gone through with it – gone through with leaving him to the Oprichniki – if my final thoughts or my final words to him had been of friendship. I had pushed all such ideas out of my mind with thoughts of him as a traitor. Although our liking of Maks could be quite independent of our knowledge of his treachery, in the final reckoning of him, one had to be counted as outweighing the other. In Desna, Maks' treachery had been the weightier matter, but the scales still fluctuated hour by hour, reluctant to reveal the side on which they would finally come to rest.