To Pekkala, the old Cossack Tatischev had seemed indestructible, but on the third year of their meetings, Pekkala showed up at the clearing to find Tatischev’s marrowless and chamfered bones scattered about the clearing, and metal grommets from his boots among the droppings of the wolves who had devoured him.
‘Maybe I could have survived after living that long in the forest,’ said Pekkala, ‘but I doubt I would have wanted to.’
Exhausted from his run
Exhausted from his run, Rifleman Stefanov arrived back at the Alexander Park. Until this moment, he had been so numbed by the relentless and deadly ritual of retreating, digging a foxhole, grabbing a few hours of sleep beneath his rain cape and then repeating the process again the following day that he’d barely had the energy to feel more than a vague sense of bewilderment at finding himself at Tsarskoye Selo, or Detskoye Selo, or Pushkin Village or whatever they were calling it these days. Only now was the focus returning to his mind, and as he stared across the untended grounds, the grass so deep it stood knee high in places, Stefanov was at last confronted with the past he had worked so hard to keep secret from everyone around him.
He had spent the first ten years of his life here, within sight of the Catherine and Alexander Palaces, as the son of the head gardener, Agripin Dobrushinovich Stefanov, whose family had worked on this estate for generations. Since the Revolution, he had lived in terror that this mere association with the Romanovs, however innocent, might, in the eyes of his comrades or, even worse, the Battalion Commissar, somehow constitute a crime against the State. This was why, when Sergeant Ragozin misread the map he had been given, insisting they were in the Alexander Park rather than the Catherine, Stefanov did not offer to help. Neither, when Ragozin pointed out the building which he referred to as the Japanese Pagoda, did Stefanov offer the correction that it was, in fact, known as the Chinese Theatre, having recognised it immediately from its bullet-shaped windows and gabled rooftops tweaked up like moustaches on old tsarist generals. It was only now, as he stumbled through the huge gates of the North Entrance, that Stefanov was awed to see again the huge oaks and elms which grew beside the Lamskie Pond, at the mildewed walls of the neglected Pensioners’ Stable and at the little cottage, with its buttery yellow walls and blue shutters, where the Emerald Eye himself had lived until vanishing into the snow one winter’s night in 1917, never to return.
Stefanov’s own departure had not been far behind. His father had continued to work at Tsarskoye Selo, even after the arrest of the Tsar and the incarceration of the royal family within the boundaries of their estate, until finally the Bolshevik guards who patrolled the grounds had warned him to leave, and take his family as well, if he valued their lives.
That same night, Stefanov’s father led one of the Tsar’s prize horses from the stable, harnessed it to a wagon and set off with his family to the house of his brother, a butcher in the distant town of Borovichi.
The last glimpse Stefanov had of Tsarskoye Selo was of the Catherine Palace, its rooftop gleaming like fish scales in the moonlight.
He never thought he would see the place again, let alone race along the Podkaprizovaya Doroga in a noisy army truck, with orders to defend the place from air attack.
It was just as well that Stefanov’s father had died years ago. The old man had spent years raking leaves from the riding paths so that they would not stick to the hooves of the Tsar’s horse as he cantered by, or composting the asparagus, potatoes and carrots which the Romanovs left from their meals, or pruning the juniper hedges so that the Tsarina, who liked to walk past them with her hand held out, flat as a knife blade, skimming along just above the deep green needles, could marvel at the precision of his blade. To see the grass this deep, the hedges wild and overgrown, would probably have broken the old man’s heart.
The place where they had chosen to deploy the 25-mm anti-aircraft gun stood at the edge of the Alexander Park, close by the Krasnoselskie Gates. Here, the wide expanse of open ground offered a good field of fire for any planes swooping low over the Pushkin Estate. The wheels of the gun carriage had been cranked off the ground, allowing the weapon to be placed on four outrigger posts, which provided a stable base for firing.
The blast shield had been painted with mud and dead leaves. This had to be done from scratch every time they set up the weapon. He could not rely on old, dried mud to do the trick. The colour of mud differed every time they stopped and the type of leaves might also give away a gun’s position if they were not properly matched to the environment. If the weapon was spotted and came under air attack, there was little they could do except grimly blaze away at the diving plane in a duel which rarely ended well for the crews of 25-mm guns, the smallest in the arsenal of Red Army anti-aircraft weapons.
When Stefanov returned to the shelter of the trees‚ the other members of the gun team‚ in an unusual display of tact‚ refrained from asking what he had just witnessed. The expression on his face told them all they needed to know. Taking up the shovel which served his three-man section as both foxhole and latrine digger, Stefanov began to hollow out a shelter for himself.
He worked quickly, and softly chanted the two-word prayer he had invented for himself when digging holes. No stones. No stones. No stones. To be effective, the hole had to be knee deep and large enough to accommodate his body when curled into a foetal position. Lined with a few strips of cardboard from a carton of tushonka meat rations and covered with his plasch-palatka rain cape, a properly dug hole would provide him not only with protection but a place to grab a few hours’ sleep before the order came to rig the gun for transport once again.
When the foxhole had been completed, Stefanov swept his arm back and forth around the edges, scattering the dark earth which might give away his location from the air. As he performed this ritual, his sleeve caught on something which tore into the fabric and jabbed him in the wrist. At first he mistook it for a twig but, lifting his arm, he realised it was a toy soldier. The soldier was frozen in a marching posture. Propped on his shoulder was a rifle, whose tiny bayonet had cut through Stefanov’s shirt.
Carefully, Stefanov removed the soldier from his sleeve, spat on it and rubbed away the dirt which had accumulated on the metal. He could still see the colours on the tunic: dark green with red piping, which, Stefanov seemed to recall, was the uniform of the Tsar’s Chevalier Guard.
He immediately recognised this little solider as having once belonged to the Tsarevich Alexei. Stefanov recalled the day he had been helping his father to push a wheelbarrow full of rotten apples destined for the compost heap, and the two of them had come across the Tsarevich playing a game with what had seemed to Stefanov to be hundreds of these soldiers, ranks of them lined up along the path. There were foot soldiers and soldiers on horseback and soldiers with bugles and others with flags and cannons and one tall man on a fine, white stallion who, by his gold-trimmed uniform, Stefanov supposed to be the Tsar himself. Beside that figure rode another, smaller but wearing an identical uniform. It was a moment before Stefanov grasped that this must be the Tsarevich. To be in the game, marvelled Stefanov, and not even have to pretend.
The soldiers had been brought outside in wooden boxes, in which special velvet-lined trays had been fitted to accommodate each piece. Sitting on the knee-high stack of boxes and smoking a short-stemmed pipe was the Tsarevich’s bodyguard, a sailor named Nagorny. He had high cheekbones and a long, sharp nose. His ears bent slightly outwards at the top, giving the sailor a slightly mischievous expression. Alexei had two bodyguards. The other man was a giant named Derevenko. Both men were sailors and often carried the Tsarevich when the boy’s haemophilia prevented him from walking on his own.