Iuda leapt out into the water and I made a grab after him. With my left hand I just managed to get a hold of a clump of his filthy blond hair, whilst keeping myself anchored to the bridge with my right. With only two fingers and a thumb, it was hard to get a good grip, but his hair was long and soon I had it entwined. He was at my mercy, up to his neck in the water. I could duck him beneath it, pull him to safety, or let him go.
'Tell me the truth!' I screamed at him.
'I have told you the truth,' he replied, laughing despite his predicament.
'When?' I demanded. It was not a rhetorical question and he knew it. What I wanted to know was which of his two contradictory statements was true.
'Often,' was his only reply, again accompanied by a laugh.
I pushed him downwards under the water, counting the seconds to myself to be sure that he would not die. I pulled him back up and he gasped for breath, but never lost his smile.
'Tell me!' I screamed at him again.
'You can't torture me, Lyosha.' He raised his hand to clear the wet hair from his eyes. 'I have the ultimate protection that you'll never believe me. I've told you everything – not just everything that's true, but everything else as well. All I can offer you is the ultimate enlightenment; not just what is but what could be. To know everything is to know nothing. What's the point in asking any more? What's the point in forcing it out of me? You might as well torture a coin and expect it to turn up tails.'
I pushed his head back under the water. He was right. Many people choose to live by their reputation; Iuda chose to live by the lack of it. With my help, he had put himself in a situation where I could lend no credence to anything he said. However many times I dipped his head beneath the waves, he could change his answer. The final answer would never be the definitive one, because another different answer could always follow. I could put Iuda through the agonies of hell and he could scream 'Margarita' nine hundred and ninety-nine times and I would still not believe him, for fear that on the thousandth he would mutter 'Domnikiia'.
I pulled him back up to the surface, tightening my grip on his hair as though to pull it out of his scalp.
'You're slow today, Lyosha,' he said. 'Do you still think you can get the truth out of me?'
Silistria had taught me more than one thing about torture. It had taught me about being a victim, but I had also learned about being a perpetrator. I'd learned that it's not always about gaining information; sometimes it's an end in itself.
I shook my head and waited for the look in his eyes that showed he realized that the torture was over. The instant I saw it, I pushed his head back under and began to count again. He knew that, this time, I was not intending to pull him back up again. He had chosen a game that led to his own destruction; chosen to lose with a clever move rather than survive through a mundane one. As I counted the seconds, he struggled to break free; past ten, past twenty, thirty and forty. Then he quietened. It was not long enough for a man to drown – I knew he was bluffing. My hand was so cold I could scarcely feel his head beneath it. I squeezed tighter, unable to feel even pain and wondering if I might be breaking my own fingers by gripping so tightly. After about a minute he began to struggle again and then a convulsion ripped through his body. Had that been his final, irresistible, instinctive attempt to breathe, when the urging of his lungs overcame the knowledge that he was surrounded not by air but by water? Afterwards, he moved no more.
I waited for a further minute with my numbed arm plunged deep into the river before I raised it to look into his face. He was gone. A clump of trailing blond hairs was left curled around in my insensible fingers, but of the rest of him there was no sign. His body had been ripped from my numb, frozen hand by the torrent of the river. I looked out downstream, but it was an impossible task to distinguish one lifeless, floating corpse from another. Amongst them, a few swimmers even now made it to the safety of the western shore, but I did not see Iuda amongst those either.
I pulled myself back in, underneath the bridge, my knees hunched up against my chest as I listened, troll-like, to the tramp, tramp, tramp of feet above my head. I began to shiver. The layers of clothing that I wore were all wet through. If I were to leave my hand at rest for too long against some piece of the bridge's structure, it might freeze there. I crawled back along under the bridge to the eastern bank of the river. Thousands still remained to cross, but it was now unlikely that many more would. The Russian troops under Kutuzov and Wittgenstein were closing in.
I headed south along the riverbank, quickly discarding my French greatcoat. The choice was between death from the cold or from a Russian bullet. I chose not on the basis of preference but of likelihood, and it was a close-run thing. As I continued downriver, those few Russian patrols I encountered were convinced by a few words from me. The even fewer French I met were just as easily convinced when they heard their own language.
Before long, I came to Borisov, the town abandoned by Bonaparte but a few days before. Now Bonaparte was heading back west. How much of his army made it with him was open to question, but he himself would surely get back to Paris. I had no further desire to chase him, nor to chase any other Frenchman. And if Iuda were somehow still alive, I did not have the desire to pursue him, or even find out for sure if he was dead or not. He was out of Russia, or very soon would be – whether swept south, downriver to the Black Sea, or swept west with the Grande Armée to Poland and beyond. He was no longer my problem. My problems were those that he had left with me.
Though it was still dark when I reached Borisov, I was lucky enough to be able to find a horse, left forgotten as the French rushed north. I mounted it and headed out of the town.
Bonaparte would struggle on for a few more years and would even, it would transpire, rise as a brief phoenix before his ultimate finale, but here in Russia his defeat had begun. It was not a defeat that I had taken any part in. I had fought Bonaparte at Austerlitz and we had lost. I had fought him at Smolensk, and we had lost. After Borodino I had found another battle to fight. If my grandchildren one day were to ask me how I helped in the downfall of Napoleon, I would be unable to tell them the truth. I could tell them of Maksim and of Vadim and Dmitry and of how we had fought together in unorthodox ways on and off for seven years, but I could never tell them how it had ended. I could never tell them how Dmitry had frozen to death and how he had been lucky compared to Vadim and how even Vadim had been lucky compared to Maksim. For although both Vadim and Maksim had died a similar death, Maks had the added weight of knowing that he had been sent to it by those he thought to be his friends.
The doubt about Domnikiia which Iuda had so guilefully insinuated into me was, I now understood, easy to cope with. It was Maks who had suggested the solution to me. It was a matter of faith. Faith, Maks had said, allows us to feel certain about things that we can never know for sure. I could never discover whether it had been Domnikiia or Margarita with Iuda – that was knowledge that could never be known – but it was clear what I wanted the truth to be. All I had to do was have faith in my chosen view of reality. It would not be easy, certainly not for a man like me, to maintain such faith, but the fact that it meant I could be with Domnikiia would make the effort worthwhile. Every day on which my faith was rewarded would in its turn strengthen that faith – and strengthen my need for that faith. I would not, however, be seeing Domnikiia quite every day.