Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [323]
Unreal season. Unreal city. As he looked back over the last ten years of his life, and thought of the strange events of that day, it seemed to Alexander that his whole existence had been like a tiny walk-on part on this huge St Petersburg stage-set. For wasn’t it all just a play? Wasn’t poor Empress Catherine with her young lovers a pathetic personal sham? Wasn’t this huge city, built on a northern marsh, with its Italian façades gazing over an icebound wasteland, another kind of improbable deception? The city is built on wooden piles, he thought. One day they will rot and it will all fall back into the marshes. Wasn’t the enlightened noble class to which he belonged the greatest sham of all – speaking of Voltaire, yet ruling as it did over a vast empire of villages and serfs, stuck in the Middle Ages, or even the Dark Ages, if truth be told? Was Peter the Great’s vision of Russia as a great Continental Empire – wasn’t the boundless energy and ambition of the Bronze Horseman – just a wild dream, impossible ever of being achieved? As he stared over the huge river and then looked back at the great open space beside the palace, he suddenly had an overwhelming sense that the vast Russian land of marsh and forest might advance, at any moment, into the emptiness of this unnatural city.
‘Why, the whole city,’ he murmured aloud, ‘is just a huge Potemkin village – a façade. And if so, what has my life been – my gamble for power, my love of display, my desire for earthly and even heavenly rewards? Was it all a great illusion?’
It seemed to him, at that moment, that it was so. As he slowly made his way home, revolving this thought in his mind, he would glance up from time to time to notice a piece of broken-off stucco here, or the rotting bricks on the corners of the houses there, and murmur to himself: ‘Yes, it is vanity. All is vanity.’
And so deep in contemplation of this grand futility was Alexander that, returning at last in the early morning, he did not even notice the little carriage standing in front of his house, or the group of men who stood waiting to receive him. So that he looked up in astonishment as one of them stepped forward and said to him quietly: ‘State Councillor Bobrov, you are to accompany us. You are under arrest.’
The cell was pitch black. There was no light from any source.
He did not know how long he had been there but since the door had half opened, twice, and a hand had pushed in a crust of bread and a small pitcher of water, he supposed it must be between one and two days.
The cell was very small. If he stood with his back to the heavy door and reached out his right hand and his left, he could place the palms flat against the two walls. From this position he discovered he could take two full paces before his head hit the wall opposite. The first few hours he thought there was a rat in one corner; but now he was not sure. Perhaps it had found a hole somewhere and gone away. For this was the dreaded Peter and Paul Fortress. He wondered whether the cell was above or below the water level. Below, he thought.
Only one thing puzzled him. Why had they arrested him? For what crime? The arresting officer had not told him – probably had not known. And since they had thrown him in here, no one had spoken to him. There was only one thing to do: keep calm.
Another day passed. No one came. He wondered if they would leave him there to die. Then, at the end of the third day, the door opened and they pulled him out, and a few minutes later he found himself standing, rather unsteadily, in a large room, blinking at the pain of the light, and becoming vaguely aware of the fact that, after his confinement, he was stinking. There was a single guard in the room and when Alexander asked him what was going on he replied gruffly: ‘You’ll be questioned.’
‘Oh. By whom?’
‘Don’t you know?’ The guard grinned. ‘By Sheshkovsky himself, of course.’ Then he laughed. ‘You’ll talk.’
And now, despite his determination