“Have you come to identify me?” he asked without rising from his chair.
“No.”
“Then why are you here?” Obviously not recognizing me, he pressed, “Who are you?”
“I am his wife.”
A sharp look of surprise crossed his face, yet he did not rise, nor for that matter did he bow. I didn’t care in the least for matters of etiquette, however. I slumped into the chair next to him and quite against my will the tears came aplenty.
Gently, he said, “Princess, don’t cry. It had to be so.” And then, as if thinking aloud, he snapped, “Why do they talk to me only after I have committed a murder?”
I found my eyes staring upon his small hands, the very ones that had hurled the bomb, and to banish that path of thought from my mind I reached out and clasped one of his soft hands, and quietly said, “You must have suffered a great deal to take this decision.”
Clearly, he felt somehow belittled or otherwise offended by my comment, which was of total innocence, and he pulled away and leaped to his feet, blurting out, “What difference does it matter whether I have suffered or not? But, it’s true, I have suffered throughout my life, and I join my suffering to millions of others. Too much blood is being spilt around us, yet we have no other form of protest against a cruel government and a terrible war.” He slammed a clenched fist into his leg, again repeating, “Radi boga,” for the sake of God, “why do they talk to me only after I have committed murder?”
I felt this man’s pain, his torture. Surely there was something good within him, surely there was reason to appeal for mercy for the fallen. He was, after all, as a second godly creature after God.
And, quietly, I said, “It’s a pity that you did not come to see us, that we did not know you earlier.”
“What? You must know what they did to the workers on January ninth, when the people went to see the Tsar, yes? Did you really think that this could go unpunished? There’s a war of hatred being waged against the people. I would give my life a thousand times again, not just once. Russia must be free!”
“But honor, the honor of our country-”
“Honor?” he barked, interrupting me. “What honor?”
“Do you really imagine that we don’t suffer?” I pleaded, for my heart was breaking not simply for my husband but for my country. “Do you honestly believe that we do not wish for the good of the people?”
“Well… you are suffering now…”
We both fell into silence, and he, somewhat calmer, sat down again next to me.
I softly said, “The Grand Duke was a good man, but he had been expecting death, which was the great reason he was preparing to leave the post of Governor-General.”
“Let’s not talk about the Grand Duke. I don’t want to discuss him with you. I’ll tell everything at the trial. You know that I carried this out completely consciously. The Grand Duke assumed a specific political role. He knew what he wanted.”
“Yes, but…” I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I can’t enter into political discussions with you. I only wanted you to know…” I took a deep breath. “I only wanted you to know that the Grand Duke forgives you, and that I will pray for you.”
He looked upon me with soft eyes, then turned away, and confessed, “People have been spared. By will of the Organization, by my will as well, people-and by this I mean you and the children-have avoided bloodshed.”
“What-? You mean-?”
He nodded, and replied, “We could have acted sooner, and nearly did, but we decided to wait until the Grand Duke was alone.”
It was too incredible a thought: the children nearly killed as well? Dear Lord! I gasped, didn’t know how to reply. I felt only a duty to weep with the weeping.
Entering the curious air between us, Kalyayev said, “Between the act of killing your husband and my scaffold lies, I confess, a whole eternity. Which is to say, I can’t wait-I should like to die immediately. You see, Princess, to commit the deed and later die on the scaffold-it is like sacrificing one’s life twice. It’s wonderful.”
His words took my breath away. There was hardly anything to say or do, so great was the abyss between us. And from my handbag I took an icon.
“I beg you to accept this icon in memory of me,” I said. “I will pray for you.”
He tenderly accepted the icon and in fact kissed my hand, and I departed the room. That eve, perhaps as he sat in his dark cell, he wrote a poem, which in due time was shown me:
A woman like a shadow, a ghost with no life
Sat next to me clasping my hand
She looked, and she whispered to me: “I’m his wife”
And wept and shed tears with no end.
Her frock was so black and it smelled of the grave,
But her tears… They simply told everything
So I didn’t reject her, I spared woman-slave
From the camp of the Enemy King.
Then she nervously murmured: “I’m praying for you…”
Without a doubt, I was touched by Kalyayev’s writing, for he was quite a capable wordsmith, but most importantly he was reaching for a kind of understanding.
And I did do exactly that: I prayed on my knees for that man’s soul.
Chapter 24 PAVEL
With the money we killed for and stole, we created so many spies. If the Tsar thought he had many secret agents watching us, why, within months we had more than him, an entire secret army watching him and his. People were sick of the way the Romanovs had treated us, sitting upon us and trading us like we were cords of wood. But no more, we had stepped forward and we would fight back! Yes, and so we had spies spying on people, and people spying on spies, and so on and so forth. Frankly, there was only one problem: I never knew which comrade to trust.
Our Poet was soon taken to the Boutyrsk Prison, where with a few bitter words about capitalism and a fistful of rubles we managed to convert some of the guards to our side. We wanted-we needed-to know how Kalyayev was getting along, not just because we cared for him but more importantly because we needed to know if he’d cracked and revealed anything about us, which, as we learned, he hadn’t. That he continued to be the perfect revolutionary and remained loyal to the Organization came not as a surprise, just more of a relief, and his unbroken dedication to the overthrow of the Tsar inspired us more than ever.
There was only one thing that caused us distress, news of which came directly from Kalyayev in a smuggled letter. He was incredibly angry. Tormented. And in the smallest handwriting on a scrap of paper, he told why, that it was because of her, that Romanov woman, the Grand Duchess who should have died with her evil husband. What filled him with bitter regret was that news of his meeting with her was passed up and down the street, and appeared in every newspaper, each version more strange and different than the last.
“Comrades,” he wrote to us, “please forgive me my foolish deed, please don’t think ill of me! I should not have met with her… it makes me feel a traitor to the Organization!”
So upset was he that in short time he even wrote her a letter, a copy of which he made sure our spies got to us, for he wanted us, his comrades, to know what really happened.
Princess-
I did not know you, you came to me of your own accord: therefore the responsibility for the consequences of our meeting lies solely with you.
Our meeting took place, to all outward appearances, in circumstances of intimacy. What passed between us was not meant for publication but concerned us alone. We met on neutral ground, at your own direction, tête-à-tête, and were thus entitled to the same right of incognito. How otherwise to explain your selfless Christian feeling?
I trusted your nobility, supposing that your exalted official position and your personal merit would provide suf ficient guarantee against the kind of malicious intrigue in which even you, to some extent, have been implicated. But you were not afraid to be seen involved: my trust in you has not been justified.