Russian Hide-and-Seek

22

The little churchyard was crowded. A guard of honour from the regiment lined the paths and stood in a double line at the graveside. Across the road, 8 Troop were paraded under Sergeant Ulmanis, who at a signal from Colonel Tabidze ordered a party to dismount. Six men did so, went to the nearby waggon and, with Lyubimov in charge, lifted the coffin on to their shoulders. They moved carefully but not very smartly into the churchyard while a contingent from the regimental band played a slow march.

Lomov was not one of the six; he had not volunteered for the duty and was in any case too small. He sat his horse in a soldierly way, holding the reins of Lyubimov’s. The last time he came this way he had wept a great deal, genuine tears produced by very genuine relief. He had broken military regulations, disobeyed an officer’s order, had a hard ride, seen (or rather not seen) two strange things and come within a second of being a party to murder. Always a quick thinker, he had instantly and rightly guessed that to have saved Controller Petrovsky from death would square his account with the army; Lyubimov’s too. Now Lomov congratulated himself on the native curiosity that had taken him up to the house just in time, and held back a smile of complacency at knowing what all but a very few besides himself would have given a month’s pay to know. He was on the whole sorry that the ensign was dead, but he had been too changeable for a good officer, exciting to ride with, dangerous to cross, in fact dangerous at all times.

Some members of the regiment had attended the burial as private persons and stood here and there inside the churchyard: Victor, Boris, Dmitri among others. Major Yakir was there too, but in his capacity as the deceased’s squadron commander. Victor had picked his station with some care, in a corner of the walls where everyone within reach would have his back to him and he would be able to wield his vodka-flask without being noticed. As the place filled up, other mourners moved quite close to him. The closest was a woman wearing a curious black dress and hat, evidently on her own. She was in her thirties and had a remarkable bosom which he glimpsed when she half turned and gave him a brief stare. After that, she took another step or two backwards until she was standing really very close to him. He had started to take a quick swig from his flask, thinking this an ideal opportunity, when he suddenly choked. His feelings of grief for the dead, never profound, vanished altogether.

The coffin was lowered into the grave. Colonel Tabidze rested at the salute for a minute afterwards and there was comparative silence everywhere. Then he lowered his hand to his side, took a pace forward and began to speak.

‘We bury here today a gallant young officer who gave his life for his country and also, by an inspiring chance, for his father. In the midst of our grief we can only rejoice that the ruthless assassins responsible for this atrocity have been caught and punished. May their names perish in infamy. In their victim, Alexander Petrovsky, Russia and England have lost a good soldier and a good friend. His parents, to whom our hearts go out in sympathy and love, have lost the best of sons. Everybody who knows the family knows how Alexander revered his father and mother. As one who knew him all his life and was his commanding officer for the whole length of his brief career, I am perhaps specially qualified…’

By now, almost everyone had stopped listening. All but a few had paid close attention at first in the hope of picking up some clue to the truth about Alexander’s death, which by common consent could not have happened as officially described. The general disbelief arose not from any inherent improbability in the story of the two masked gunmen who escaped after their assassination attempt but were captured later at some distant place; elsewhere there had been plenty of successful attempts of that kind within an hour or two. It was just that the notion of Alexander giving half an hour of his free time, let alone his life, for his country or his father (or any other entity) could not be a true one. Such persons were none the wiser, and likely to remain so. The others, the few like Lomov who knew what had happened, had listened with less curiosity to Tabidze’s opening remarks, looking for nothing more than some inner amusement at the skill and extravagance of his evasions. Another of this party, Brevda, felt none of that. After the first shock he had settled down to a state of low-intensity panic that might run wild at any moment. He had not yet been brought to account for nearly letting the Controller get killed under his nose, but it could not be long delayed. No doubt the boss was waiting for the funeral to be over and things to get back to normal; then would come the summons to the Directorate. Of Alexander, except remotely, as the cause of the trouble, there was no thought in Brevda’s head at all.

Tabidze was nearly at the end of his address. He had worked on it with characteristic conscientiousness, mentioning everybody who should have been mentioned, avoiding flat lies wherever possible in speaking of the deceased, enumerating his virtues without gross exaggeration, or at any rate without downright invention. And, because these things had to be done properly, and fiddling with pieces of paper at the graveside was not doing things properly, he had learned his speech by heart and had practised it. Naturally he kept to himself his own opinion of Alexander. This started with the observation that the young idiot had tried to be too many things. To take only his soldiering: from one moment to the next one never knew whether he was going to turn out to be a liberal or a martinet, a technician or a cavalryman, a rule-book pedant or an improviser, a dandy or a professional. Add to that his sex-life, his social life… And then this final, fatal piece of lunacy. On the whole he had been a liability to the regiment, showy rather than brilliant, and too easily bored to be trusted. Life would be more comfortable with him gone, and not appreciably duller.

‘So death has taken away Alexander Petrovsky,’ said Tabidze in conclusion. ‘Everybody here must be distressed by the knowledge that he or she will never see him again. That’s all.’

He came to the salute once more. His trumpeter, fluffing occasionally, sounded the meagre, sentimental dirge that served as Lights Out. The guard of honour rested on their arms, heads bowed. The firing-party discharged their old-style carbines across the grave and the English attendants started shovelling the earth back in.

On the other side, in the front row of mourners, stood the small black-clad figure of Elizabeth Cuy, one of the couple of dozen conspirators who had conspired to little or no purpose and had been released after questioning. She was crying bitterly, or rather with great intensity. She was thinking of herself as she wept, of herself as the girl who had had a hopeless passion for a young man who had now died. When she did think of Alexander it was of someone who had treated her with some unkindness and not a great deal of notice, and perhaps some of her tears were those of one who lays down a burden. Agatha Tabidze was next to her, and she too was crying, but then she always cried at funerals, even ones that commemorated people she had not particularly cared for. Tatiana Petrovsky, on the other side, was the only person present who was shedding genuine tears, being likewise the only person in the world who would have grieved for Alexander whatever he had been like. She was grieving for Nina too, also taken from her and yet still living, and so already beginning to occupy a larger place in her thoughts. Her surviving son, Basil, off the aeroplane from Manchuria only that morning, had her hand in his but was not weeping. Sergei Petrovsky was not weeping either. Nor was he grieving; he was entirely taken up with the bad time his conscience was giving him.

8 Troop was filing off at a slow pace, Polly next to Ulmanis at their head, her saddle and bridle hung with black. The guard of honour marched out into the road and the crowd began to disperse. It was a chilly day with, in the past few minutes, small gusts of rain. Kitty Wright had reached the gate of the churchyard when a young Russian officer approached her.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said; ‘may I speak with you?’

‘All right, but it’ll probably be easier if we use Russian.’

‘Thank you. Aren’t you Kitty? Alexander’s girl? I’m called Dmitri. This must be a sad day for you.’

‘Yes, it is.’ A sad day it was; not an unpleasant day or a difficult day, but a sad one.

‘I liked him. I didn’t know him well, but I thought he was a good fellow. Are you coming up to the house for a drink? We’re all invited.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Yes you are; I’m inviting you. Nobody’ll mind. Things are getting easier all the time.’

‘All right,’ said Kitty again. ‘It’ll be funny to see it. He never brought me here, but he talked about it. I wonder if it’ll be as I imagine.’

They waited for more people to leave, then slowly made their way against the flow towards the side of the church. As they passed the grave, now completely filled in, the turfs back in place, something she had heard that night at the theatre came half-way into Kitty’s memory, something about somebody dying and being turned into stars and put in the sky. With more concentration than she had ever summoned before, she tried to remember the precise words, just some of them, just one phrase, but she was not used to efforts of that kind. She tried again; she nearly got it. No. It was gone.