‘Yes,’ said Kirov. To say ‘I’m sorry’ would be inadequate, and yet he was, desperately so. He held out his hand, and Caulaincourt stared at it for an instant as if he didn’t know what it was. Then he took it and grasped it.
‘You had better go now,’ Caulaincourt said. ‘I will have you escorted out of the town – when this news about Vitebsk spreads, it will be dangerous to be Russian. You have what you need for your journey home?’
It was a curious courtesy from a general of a starving army, but neither of them seemed to see it so.
‘Yes, we have what we need. Armand – when it is all over – if we should meet again–’
Caulaincourt nodded. ‘It was not our fault, none of it,’ he said. ‘But I wish to God I had died at Borodino with Auguste. A man who has seen what I have seen has lived too long. Adieu, Nikolai. God send you a safe journey.’
‘God bless you, old friend,’ Nikolai said painfully.
Caulaincourt shook his head. ‘I think He has forgotten us,’ he said.
Caulaincourt’s escort took them out of the city by one of the northern gates, since the remains of the Grande Armée was still straggling in by the eastern gate. They rode north at first, and then struck eastwards, travelling across country, taking a direct line towards Moscow. A week later they came back to the Smolensk-Moscow High Road at Ghzatsk, far enough behind the army to have avoided the rearguard under the fierce old warrior, Maréchal Ney, and even the stragglers.
The temperature had gone on falling, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen below. The days were breathtakingly cold, and dazzlingly beautiful, with skies of a vivid purity arching dark blue to the zenith above them; sunrise and sunset turning the snow to rose and carmine. The intense cold froze the crust of the snow and the surface of the rivers, making the travelling easier, and the hardy, sure-footed ponies could cover five or six miles an hour during the short days.
But when they had passed Ghzatsk, the clouds gathered, and the snow began again, lightly at first, but gradually thickening until it was impossible to see more than a few yards ahead. Adonis looked towards his master for instructions, and then, seeing that he was sunk deep in thought, shouted out to him, ‘We must take shelter, sir. Shall we turn back to Ghzatsk?’
Kirov looked at him, bemused, and shook his head as though to shake his thoughts into order. ‘What? Shelter – yes, we must have shelter,’ he mumbled.
Anne almost laughed. ‘Koloskavets is up ahead, you fools! Zina and Stenka will make us comfortable! There’ll be food and firewood and fodder for the ponies, too.’
‘Provided the French army hasn’t been there first,’ Adonis said, annoyed that he hadn’t thought of it himself.
It was snowing so hard by now that it was difficult to find the path up the hillside. The snow had covered everything, every landmark, in a featureless white blanket, and for a time they were completely lost, casting about, unable even to be sure that they were on the road. Surprisingly, Anne discovered that is was not even possible to tell whether one was going uphill or downhill, and that was most frightening of all.
The ponies trudged on uncomplainingly, their faces and manes crusted thick, even their eyelashes loaded with soft white flakes like overhanging eaves. As time went on, and they still could not find their way, Anne knew the first pang of fear; and, warmly wrapped, fed, and mounted on a sturdy pony, she had suddenly a clear and piercing sense of the plight of the French soldiers she had seen. For the first time she had some idea of the almost unimaginable agonies they must be suffering, clad only in thin woollen uniforms, without boots, without food, without shelter. The pain they would suffer from the agonising cold would be relieved only by the numbness that precedes death – a numbness they must surely come to welcome. Only fifty thousand of them left, she remembered – and how many more were yet to die?
‘Over there – look!’ Adonis suddenly shouted, his voice muffled by the snow and his upturned collar. ‘That must be Borodino – we’ve wandered off the road. Come on, this way! Stay close!’
To their left, a vague shape rearing up was the remains of the twin towers of Borodino’s church. They had strayed, Anne realised, on to what had been the battlefield, though the snow of the past weeks, thank God, had spread a uniform blanket of white over the horrors beneath, freezing the undulating crust hard. Dead men and horses, discarded arms, dismounted cannon, all were buried deep under the innocence of whiteness, like laundered sheets, which took the ugliness from everything.
In the spring, when the thaw came, Anne could imagine what would be revealed. It would not be a good place to be in the spring. The new snowfall lay like feathers over the old crust, and Anne had a sudden terror that the weight of her and her pony would break through it. Vividly she imagined them plunging through some weakened place into a gully full of corpses, which the carrion crows had not had time to pick clean before the snow came. She shook the hideous image away, and concentrated instead on the thought of Koloskavets and a blazing fire.
Taking their bearings from Borodino, they found the path at last by the pine trees growing along its margins, and Adonis sent his pony up the hillside in a series of plunging leaps, with Anne close behind him, and Nikolai leading the spare horse bringing up the rear. Now they were so close, every moment of delay before reaching shelter seemed intolerable. Surely it had never been so far up the hill as this? Surely they must have missed their way again, and be riding away from the house instead of towards it? Anne was desperate now to be out of the saddle, to rub her numb hands and feet, to rest, to eat hot food. She felt that another five minutes out here in the blizzard would break her heart; and yet five minutes were followed by five minutes more.
And then, quite suddenly, they were there: the grey walls had been invisible in the background of whirling snow until they came in sight of the black iron gates. They rode into the yard and out of the wind, and suddenly the snow was falling gently like a tame thing, like a holiday thing, for making snowballs and toboggan slopes. And there was Stenka in tulup and fur hat and huge boots, grinning toothlessly as he stumped forward to take the horses’ heads; and there was Zina in the doorway to the kitchen, smiling serenely, as if their arrival were nothing untoward, as if they had only been away on a day’s hunting.
‘Come in, Barina, and get yourself warm. If you wouldn’t mind stepping into the kitchen, Barina – the fire in the drawing-room’s laid but not lit. I’ll go up and do that as soon as I’ve helped you off with your things.’
‘Thank you, Zina. I shall be glad to get out of this saddle.’
Zina nodded calmly, watching them with her unfathomable eyes, accepting, unjudging. ‘The samovar’s almost on the boil. I can have tea for you in a few moments.’
Anne dismounted stiffly and handed the reins to Stenka, and trudged towards the open doorway and the light and warmth. War and invasion had convulsed the land, death and disease and starvation and horrors of every kind had been unleashed; men were this minute lying down in the snow and dying from cold and hunger; but it was impossible to think of any of that now. Zina had said the magic word tea, and somewhere in there ahead of her there was a fire.
The blizzard lasted for three days; but even had it stopped during the first night, they would not have gone on. They had reached a haven, and for the moment they did not want to leave it. Nikolai remembered how before the battle he had found Koloskavets a single reality set between two opposing and equally unreal worlds. Now, with nothing to see beyond the windows but featureless whiteness, it seemed the only reality, a small place hanging in oblivion, which had somehow survived the wiping-out of the rest of creation.