Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [327]
Was it chance, or some malicious afterthought of the empress, that had caused Alexander to be put in a cell with this fellow? Probably the latter.
He was very tall and gaunt, a little older than Alexander, with a long, straggling black beard and deepset black eyes that gazed out from their hollows with a kind of fervent intensity. It had seemed strange, therefore, given the complete absence of physical likeness, that he should have announced to Alexander, on their first day together, that he was none other than Catherine’s husband, the late Tsar Peter.
He was entirely harmless. At some time the empress must have decided he was a nuisance and locked him up. Perhaps he had been forgotten. Who was he? Alexander guessed he was a state peasant from somewhere in the north. The fellow could not read or write and mostly sat there, staring fervently at the wall: occasionally he would speak, earnestly, about Holy Russia, and denounce the empress as an atheist and a harlot. When he did so, Alexander would quietly nod and say: ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’ In his own mind he called the man, like the pretenders of olden times, the False Peter. They shared the cell quite peaceably.
The thoughts that disturbed his peace of mind by day took many months to form. Indeed, at first he was not even aware that they were taking shape.
When Tatiana came, Alexander was taken to another cell, where they were allowed to talk undisturbed. He enjoyed these meetings. Tatiana was always very calm and quietly affectionate. She would sit there with the children and give him news of the outside world. Thus he learned about the terrible events in France: how the Jacobins had executed the King and his poor Queen Marie Antoinette. He heard how Catherine and her son Paul were on worse terms than ever, and that it seemed increasingly likely she would try to pass him over for her grandsons. He learned that Poland, finally, had been completely taken over by her neighbouring powers and that most of it was now, virtually, a Russian province. ‘One cannot deny,’ Tatiana remarked, ‘that Empress Catherine has been hugely successful.’
And whenever she came, he never failed, with a playful smile, to ask: ‘What news, then, from the big city?’
It was their special joke, and it referred not to St Petersburg, or even Moscow, nor even the provincial capital of Vladimir, but to Russka.
For the little town was now officially a city. True, it mustered little more than a thousand inhabitants; true, the road which led to it was only a dirt track, so deeply rutted that it was almost unusable – indeed, the river was still the best approach until the snows of winter came; but when Catherine had reformed the local administration fifteen years before, it had been decided that the little backwater should be raised, at least on paper, to the dignity of city. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of such cities in the Russian empire now – depressed little villages carrying this grandiose designation in preparation for the splendid new world that was to come. It was a contrast between official and actual reality which Alexander nowadays found rather amusing. ‘Have they mended the gate,’ he would ask, ‘in the big city?’
How he admired Tatiana. He came to do so more with every month that passed. His father had built a modest wooden house on the slope above Dirty Place – then never used it. But she had completely cleaned it up; she watched over the estates herself; the children seemed healthy. ‘But aren’t you terribly bored down here?’ he would ask. ‘Shouldn’t you go to Moscow or St Petersburg?’
‘Not at all,’ she always replied. ‘I find the country suits me very well.’ And gradually, as the months went by, the new realization began to dawn upon him. ‘I’ve sold the St Petersburg house,’ she informed him early in the first year. Then, two months later: ‘I hope you won’t mind, Alyosha, but I’ve dismissed