The thoughts that disturbed his peace of mind by day took many months to form. Indeed, at first he was not even aware that they were taking shape.
When Tatiana came, Alexander was taken to another cell, where they were allowed to talk undisturbed. He enjoyed these meetings. Tatiana was always very calm and quietly affectionate. She would sit there with the children and give him news of the outside world. Thus he learned about the terrible events in France: how the Jacobins had executed the King and his poor Queen Marie Antoinette. He heard how Catherine and her son Paul were on worse terms than ever, and that it seemed increasingly likely she would try to pass him over for her grandsons. He learned that Poland, finally, had been completely taken over by her neighbouring powers and that most of it was now, virtually, a Russian province. ‘One cannot deny,’ Tatiana remarked, ‘that Empress Catherine has been hugely successful.’
And whenever she came, he never failed, with a playful smile, to ask: ‘What news, then, from the big city?’
It was their special joke, and it referred not to St Petersburg, or even Moscow, nor even the provincial capital of Vladimir, but to Russka.
For the little town was now officially a city. True, it mustered little more than a thousand inhabitants; true, the road which led to it was only a dirt track, so deeply rutted that it was almost unusable – indeed, the river was still the best approach until the snows of winter came; but when Catherine had reformed the local administration fifteen years before, it had been decided that the little backwater should be raised, at least on paper, to the dignity of city. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of such cities in the Russian empire now – depressed little villages carrying this grandiose designation in preparation for the splendid new world that was to come. It was a contrast between official and actual reality which Alexander nowadays found rather amusing. ‘Have they mended the gate,’ he would ask, ‘in the big city?’
How he admired Tatiana. He came to do so more with every month that passed. His father had built a modest wooden house on the slope above Dirty Place – then never used it. But she had completely cleaned it up; she watched over the estates herself; the children seemed healthy. ‘But aren’t you terribly bored down here?’ he would ask. ‘Shouldn’t you go to Moscow or St Petersburg?’
‘Not at all,’ she always replied. ‘I find the country suits me very well.’ And gradually, as the months went by, the new realization began to dawn upon him. ‘I’ve sold the St Petersburg house,’ she informed him early in the first year. Then, two months later: ‘I hope you won’t mind, Alyosha, but I’ve dismissed the steward.’ A year later, after a good harvest, she told him: ‘I’m adding two little wings to the old house. I think you’ll like them.’ And to his astonishment, when he remarked that one day, when he was finally released, he’d try to pay off some of their debts, she smiled, kissed him and whispered: ‘We haven’t got any, my dearest.’
‘But how? Who gave us money?’
‘No one, Alyosha. The estates are quite profitable, you know. And,’ she smiled wryly, ‘our expenses in the country are modest, you see.’
He had said nothing, but after she had gone he sighed to himself and murmured: ‘The truth is, the best thing I ever did for the Bobrov family was to go to jail.’ It was an uncomfortable thought, and was soon followed by another: What use, then, will I be to my family even when I am released? The German girl had taken over.
Though he loved and admired his wife, he came often to ponder this, grimly, by day.
The dream that came to him by night was so absurd that it was laughable. It did not come very often; sometimes weeks, even a couple of months, might pass in between occurrences. But whenever the dream reappeared, it was always exactly the same.
It was the countess. She came to him just as she had that night years ago – a pale, insistent vision, staring at him, wagging her finger and hissing with an urgency that was as terrible as it was meaningless: ‘Voltaire. Voltaire.’
Why should this foolish dream upset him so? It was hard to say. Yet each time he had it, he awoke with a sense of emptiness and desolation that was hard to bear; he would awake with a cry that echoed round the monastery, and in the dim light from the dawn, he would find, even in the staring, angry eyes of the False Peter, a certain sense of comfort.
Once, after he had been in the cell for three years, the vision appeared as usual, but instead of speaking, the old countess just stared at him, with a quiet satisfaction; and then, obscenely, as if they were sharing some obscure joke about the world from beyond the grave, it seemed to Alexander that she winked. After that, the dream did not recur again.
It was a little before Christmas, in the year 1795, that Alexander heard a sled arrive in the courtyard of the monastery; its arrival was followed by a long pause then, to his surprise, he was taken out of his cell and brought to the one used for visits, and a few minutes later, a figure in a fur coat and hat was ushered in.
It was Adelaide de Ronville.
She had been visiting Vladimir. ‘And you know,’ she explained with a little shrug, ‘it’s not so far to Russka, in a sled.’
Alexander smiled. How moved he was that she should have made the journey. ‘How did you get in here? Did you bribe the monks?’ She nodded. ‘And where will you stay? You must go to our estate. You can’t get back to Vladimir tonight.’
‘Yes. They are expecting me there.’
He did not argue. ‘Let me look at you,’ he begged, and helped her off with her coat.
She stood before him. She was sixty. The lines on her face were more deeply scored, making an intricate network; yet when she turned her face up to his, it seemed to Alexander that, more than ever, the lines only accentuated and further defined what had been there. She made a slightly ironic little gesture with her mouth. ‘I grow old. These days, you know, there is nothing so wonderful to see.’
‘I do not agree.’
They talked for a little time. He asked after the countess, and learned that she was very frail, but otherwise unchanged. Had she forgiven him? ‘Of course not.’ He asked Adelaide about her own life. Had she a new lover?
‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. It’s not important.’ They talked quietly, just as usual, until a monk came to indicate that Adelaide must leave. As Alexander held her coat for her again, he lightly touched her arm.
For many hours after Adelaide had gone, he found to his own surprise that he was trembling; and by this understood, more certainly even than in years gone by, that he would always be the prisoner of this, the nearest that he had come to passion in his life.
On the last day of the year 1796, some seven weeks after the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia died, Alexander Bobrov was released from prison, having completed only four years of his sentence. For one of the first acts of the new Tsar, Paul, was to give an amnesty to almost all the enemies of the mother he detested. Alexander went to his estate nearby.
It was just three months later that Countess Turova also died. ‘Truly,’ everyone said, ‘an era has really passed.’ She left the bulk of her huge estate to Alexander’s distant cousin. And a quarter of it to Adelaide de Ronville, who married soon after.
The Duel
1802
High in the blue September sky a pale sun hovered, while from time to time small white clouds drifted over the endless plain.
As they passed, the clouds assumed many forms. One resembled a fish, open-mouthed as it crossed the azure sky; another a horse and rider; a third, perhaps, the witch Baba Yaga sweeping by.
They came from the east, in a leisurely procession, past the old frontier city of Nizhni Novgorod, where the mighty Volga meets the sluggish Oka, and into the huge loop in the R of Russian rivers that is the Russian heartland. Westward towards Moscow they came, over ancient Russian cities – Riazan, Murom, Suzdal and stately Vladimir. And some of them, too, passed over the small, shining ribbon of river that cut through the forest down to the little town of Russka and the village beyond.