He hits her hard, across the face, and then again, this time drawing blood from her nose.
‘I love him,’ she shrieks, ‘and no matter how long you keep me in here, you will never be able to stop me! I will never be yours! I will never belong to you!’
The alcohol in his system has dulled. She can tell by the way he climbs astride her, the way he might move a chess piece. With painstaking care. He straddles her and she begins to spread her legs, wanting it to be over with as quickly as possible, but he holds her in place. Tonya opens her mouth to scream but no sound emerges, her voice is too weak, so she clamps down on her tongue until it’s bleeding too and the pain bursts out of her eyes instead – but still she doesn’t make a sound, even as the blows are different, deeper, intended to lay waste.
She begins to feel muddled and muddy, and now she couldn’t say a thing even if she wanted to because she doesn’t know where her mouth is, where anything is, or whether she is in too many pieces ever to be repaired.
‘Please drink, Antonina Nikolayevna.’ It is Olenka. ‘You have gone a day without.’
Tonya turns in bed with a moan. She accepts the cup and spills water down her nightgown, but there is already wetness in the bed sheets. She submerges her hands in it, this plummy liquid, and then she holds her fingers up. They are webbed with blood.
‘It is less now,’ says Olenka mournfully.
‘Why am I … ?’
Olenka hangs her head. ‘The doctor thinks you have lost your pregnancy.’
Tonya gazes at her hands. Dmitry has killed the baby. It couldn’t have had a good hold in there to begin with, given Mama’s history, and he jarred it loose. He cracked her open at last and something fell out. Yes, Dmitry killed the baby – but she was the one who waited too long. She should have run away from him before any of this. Instead she let herself and her unborn child ripen, mould, split like summer fruit gone to spoil.
It is her doing, too.
She looks back at Olenka, who appears terrified and has begun to cough.
‘Olenka,’ Tonya says, ‘you must help me.’
The maid only coughs harder.
‘Olenka,’ says Tonya, ‘I will die, if I stay here any longer. You must help me. You must unlock my door for me tonight.’
‘Oh.’ Olenka’s eyes are wide and pained. ‘I can’t—’
‘Was there never in your life,’ says Tonya, just above a hiss, ‘a time when you needed one person to take pity on you, when no one else would? Have you never been snatched from the brink, through the kindness of one other soul?’
‘I can’t, Antonina Nikolayevna,’ is the meagre reply.
‘You can,’ Tonya insists. ‘Anastasia is dead. There’s nothing to keep you here either. You should take everything you can carry that’s of any value and leave this house. Go home to your family.’
Olenka begins to weep, but is still coughing. Together it makes a wretched cacophony. Tonya thinks for one wild moment that she can overpower the maid with threats, that she must look like a madwoman, a murderer, in these stained sheets, with these stained hands, and it does happen, that women come apart after they lose a baby. It happened, a little, to Mama, over and over again. Leave the door unlocked, Olenka, or the first life I will take for the one that has just been lost is yours! She feels it, even without saying it, the swell of insanity.
‘You and I,’ she says softly, ‘we should never have left the countryside, that’s the trouble. Those were our real lives, Olenka, and all this, it is only a bad dream. Let us wake from it at last.’
It must be near midnight, but the night sky is only a deep maroon, marred by fog. The season will tip soon into summer, just as Dmitry said. How long has she been in here? Weeks? Months? She should have kept track of the days; should have marked the walls with her nails instead of breaking them off trying to scratch through the door.
Tonya tries the door handle, not daring to hope.
It is unlocked. Olenka has left it unlocked, and Dmitry appears to have made no other provisions for an escape attempt. There are no trapdoors in the parquet floors, no barricades in the corridors. Tonya’s legs are unsteady, and as she descends the stairs one ankle lands badly. Her body feels unbalanced. She makes it through to the front foyer and looks behind her, and there is a slinky stream of blood leading up to her heels.
She plods on like an injured animal. Outside, the moon shines through the fog, illuminates the way. It is crisp but not cold. She will keep to the Fontanka embankment until she reaches the Neva, will stay close to the water all the way into the Vyborg. Once Valentin’s cellar room reminded her of a mole’s burrow, or of a dungeon, but it no longer does. It will be lighter, lovelier, than anywhere else in the world.
There is little sound on the streets except for the cry of birds, the lapping of the river.
‘Tonya!’ somebody shouts, from behind.
She feels light-headed, loose-limbed. She keeps going.
‘Tonya, stop!’
Dmitry. How can it be? How could he know? How could he have heard? Or does he never sleep these days, never cease his watch? Her panic flows, ebbs just as swiftly. She wills herself to run, to fight, but her surge of strength is over. She has bled all the way from the house. She has led him directly to her.
‘Tonya.’ Dmitry has her hard by the shoulder.
His grip is iron. She tries to go limp, hopes he will loosen his hand. He doesn’t.
‘Come home,’ he says. ‘You’re weak, Tonyechka. You need to be looked after.’
She is about to reply, to ask him to kill her, because she would rather die than return to that house, but before she can speak she sees movement in the mist. A flash of red. Bright, blazing, as a bonfire. There is somebody coming.
Now she hears a new voice. It is her own.
‘Help,’ she shouts. ‘Help me!’
‘Be quiet,’ says Dmitry. ‘Come on. Let’s go home—’
‘Help me! Please, help me!’
She doesn’t know if they will help. She doesn’t know who they are. But she sees them approaching. Roving, as if they are on the lookout for prey. Young men, rail-thin and flat-eyed beneath their wayward mops of hair. She sees the red again: the bands of the Bolsheviks, tied around their upper arms. One of them carries, extended in his hand, a hunting knife with a birch handle, the kind that a peasant might use to gut a goat. He is clearly their leader.
‘What goes on here?’ he asks.
‘A private matter,’ says Dmitry roughly. ‘She is my wife.’
Tonya sees the youths steel themselves. They don’t believe in private, or possibly even in wives. Dmitry may not understand them, but she does; she has seen one of them up close, close enough that there were times when she didn’t know where her own body ended, where his began.
I didn’t know you told stories …
‘He is my husband’s employer,’ she cries, ‘and he’s murdered my husband, to have me for himself! My husband is one of you! Please, comrade! All Power to the Soviet!’
It is enough. Maybe it’s what they have been looking for. The young men encircle her and Dmitry and two of them grab Dmitry by both arms, and Tonya is instantly free. She watches as the one with the knife plunges it into Dmitry’s side. Once, hard. Deep.
Her mouth tastes coppery. Dmitry sways like a pocket watch on a chain before he falls. Stillness for a moment, and then the others drag her husband to the side of the rail, leaving him in a heap. Tonya asks if they can pull the coat off the body. She puts it on over her sullied nightgown and turns away. The youth with the blade is wiping it off on his armband, red against red. When the true socialist revolution comes, blood will run through this city like any other river, Valentin said to her once. A warning. Or perhaps just a promise.